When I was a very young man, a boy, I fantasized about spanking. Mostly about what a grown woman was thinking and feeling when she was getting a real spanking, but always about the psychology of it, about how it would be to work such intense headspaces into a real adult life, someday, despite that I didn't know that word yet. But never about harshness for its own sake, never about putting someone through that unless she needed it to feel better.

Today, I've just poured myself a stiff drink after delivering a harsh punishment to the Love Of My Life. I had to close my eyes and pseudo-meditate for long minutes beforehand, to be able to do it at all.

It's not that I'm timid about doing it -- I know too well how much good it does for her psyche in the big picture, even if it's awful for her physically and emotionally in the moment, and when I know something is what she needs, I will find a way to do most anything humanoidly possible.

I need her to be happy, for me to be happy, so it's purely selfish, I assure you.

But I wonder what I'd've thought back then, through endless imaginings on the subject, if I'd known just how very hard a thing it is to do, even after 25 years of being a Disciplinarian for my beloveds.

It's strange to think back on how tremblingly piquant the thoughts of what it would be like when I was older, and would find all these women that I thought were writing into my poorly-hidden Variations magazines and the like. How endlessly sexual it all seemed, although even early on, I was far more fascinated by the psychology of it all, than the actual mechanics.

In reality, it's very much non-sexual. I'd have to be a real sadist, which I could never be, for it to be sexual in the moment. I'm hurting someone I adore very badly. It's not a game, it's not a "scene", it's not play. It's agonizing punishment which I've carefully thought through to make her truly sob in pain -- and catharsis.

Yes, of course, it all is sexual to us, in the big picture. We're both aroused by the headspace, the atmosphere, of our household, our relationship, which includes this pretty, smart, competent woman being punished as if she were a small child -- well, in the way some might think to punish a child, although the ways that I've learned to discipline women with the Backside of Love gene swirling around in their heads achingly, are more eclectic and intense than any child should ever even be aware of!

Sometimes I find myself quiet, almost wishing for the very same kind of aftercare that I give her, afterward, my own emotional depths plumbed pretty deeply. The half-hour or so spent holding her, tenderly bringing her down from the thrashing-headed, uncontrollable heights to which I've taken her, layer by layer brushing away the yucky emotions just as I brush the hair from her face, rocking and using voicegnosis to morph the energy of all that exploded emotion into the calm of complete purging, and the completely safe cocoon of my arms, is very much a mutual trip inside.

This time, with these thoughts of intensities (both physical and emotional) in my head, and ponderings of how that all feels to others, I pick up the camera from the bedside, once she's been aftercare'd back to the ability to walk, and gone to freshen up, and snap the lingering signs of something that seems now more sacred than any religious artifact, to me -- the salty wet spot on the pillow which I put beneath her head when she's over my lap: A totem of just how unending the trust, and the bond, and the purging... and our Love... is.

--UB