You made a comment in your post that caught my eye here....(So when I think someone is not being straight with me, when a women says she wants to be loved in a respectful relationship and then leaps to defend you in your dominance/submissive syndrome, that chaps my b*tt.)
What about that chaps your backside? Perhaps I'm taking this out of context...just trying to clarify. I see plenty of room for a woman to want to be loved in a respectful relationship yet also be submissive in some ways to her H....perhaps not totally submissive, but submissive nonetheless. There are many forms of submission...not all of them are bad, yet that word seems to have a bad connotation to it.
IMPO in this case it has to do with the woman allowing the man to be a man...does that make sense? Women also (even the strongest most independent of us) need to feel like a woman....meaning, protected, cherished, treasured, wanted, desired, loved. Often, in my experience in past R's, many of those feminine needs can be met by being somewhat submissive and allowing the man to take care of her so-to-speak.
I'm not positive, but it appears that many of the HDW's on this board (such as myself) are probably fairly strong females. We're intelligent and we're capable...sometimes that can get in the way of allowing a man to care for us in a way that he may need to. For me a respectfully loving R does include room for submission. Here's an example of what I mean.
I went into my current R as a very independent, self-sufficient woman who was used to doing absolutely everything myself...if I didn't know how to do it I learned it. I could fix anything around the house, could do some auto maintenance, whatever. About a year into my M I realized my H didn't think I "needed" him...it didn't matter that I "wanted" him and was in the R because I wanted to be, the fact that I appeared not to "need" him affected him in a bad way. He needed to take care of me in some ways to feel needed. So I have conciously stepped back (became submissive) and now simply ask him to do things for me (that I'm perfectly capable of doing), like changing the oil in my car, doing home repairs, or climbing under the house to find a dead rodent (YUCK, never liked that one anyway). Now, I'm not a woman who shirks at any of the things I mentioned (I'm definitely not afraid of getting dirty or greasy), and would normally just do them without thinking. But I learned by observation with him that he seems to feel (and this is the southern boy coming out in him) that women don't do dirty work like that. His taking care of things like that for me makes him feel needed.
That to me is an example of a respectful, loving, yet submissive R.
Blackfoot...did I get anywhere near the target on what you were trying to convey?
