I fucked up. I crossed a line that I should've known not to cross and now I had to pay the price. My marriage was at stake. I was trying to salvage something from the unsatisfying relationship and I had misjudged my husband. I thought he was submissive but I learned that I had been misunderstanding him for as long as I knew him. I tried to get him to agree to a threesome with another man. I wanted to cuckold him. When he refused, I tried to blackmail him with video I had secretly taken of him in a compromising position...with my strapon stuffed up his panty-wearing ass. I thought that for sure he would not risk having everyone see that. It didn't work. To this day, I don't know if he was calling my bluff or if he really was prepared to face that. But I should know, because he does not make idle threats.

He started packing a bag and said he was, "Tired of the bullshit," and that he was, "Putting me in his rear view mirror."

I don't know how had I misjudged him so completely, but I was seeing a side of him that I didn't know existed. He was angry. I'd seen that before. He was confident. I'd seen that before too. He was convincing me that he was dead set on leaving me. I hadn't seen that before. As I said, he doesn't make idle threats. He had made a commitment, "Until death do us part," and for some reason, that was the one commitment he had made that I assumed was solid. But I had just shattered our marriage. There was nothing else I could do, so I resorted to the one thing he had never seen me do. I begged.

"Please don't go. I'm sorry. I take it back. Forgive me and forget I asked, please!?! I'll do anything!"

I knew he wouldn't forget. He's not capable of forgetting anything like that. I doubt anyone is. But that didn't matter. All I wanted to do was get him to stop packing and give me a chance to make this right.

Our 21-year marriage was good in so many ways, but our sex life had become totally perfunctory. I had stopped sucking his cock and he had stopped licking my pussy shortly after we were married. I wanted the honeymoon to go on forever and, when it didn't, I did what many frustrated wives do. I read romance novels while using a battery powered substitute. That was where I first heard about cuckolding and it intrigued me, but I just used it the concept as fantasy fuel. When only real man-meat would do, I would initiate sex with him. He had given up on initiating sex with me about 10 years into our marriage. I thought he had lost his libido, despite the fact that he had told me several times that he was just tired of wasting his time with only a 1% success rate when he initiated. I should have realized that he meant exactly what he said, that he was just tired of wasting his time.

When I look back now, I realize that I had often used the prospect of sex with me as a reason he had for paying attention to me, even though I would make no commitment to satisfying his sexual needs. If he initiated sex with me, that meant that he still found me desirable and then I could decide whether to actually have sex with him, based on whether he somehow jumped through all the hoops required (his words) to arouse me. He called my bluff way back then by opting not to play the game. He told me what he was doing but, because I was unwilling to accept my share of the blame for the situation we were in, I ignored his explanation.

I had tried to reignite the romance by telling him how the men in my romance novels treated their women. I only succeeded in irritating him by, "Comparing him unfavorably to idealized men who never existed in real life."

I had tried committing us to a regular "date night" to try to recapture the fun we had when our relationship was new and fresh. Eventually he pointed out that date night was all about fulfilling my needs by making him a captive audience on my schedule.

I tried to help him find my G-spot and I even tried to find out if he was gay by telling him that I wanted to see what it was like to have a cock and that I wanted him to see what it was like to dress up to be penetrated. He went along with both attempts and I mistook that for submissiveness. Both attempts were frustrating fiascos. He found my G-spot with a long curved vibrator and, after about forty minutes of stimulating it, I had an orgasm that was, "Different", but not very satisfying for the amount of muscle fatigue we both endured. Fucking his ass with a strapon made me feel powerful, but it wasn't particularly erotic for either of us. I tried to stimulate his prostate with my thrusting, but he didn't even get hard and my leg and hip muscles were soon burning from the effort.

So we gave up. I read my novels until soft porn without pictures just didn't do it for me any more. Then I found harder erotic stories at a web site that also had plenty of erotic photos. That's where I learned about many of the fantasies that would never show up in a bodice ripper. I started reading stories from guys who fantasized about watching their wives with other men and even licking up the creampies afterward. The website also had forums and PM and chat capability. I soon had several cyber lovers and one of them was an, "Alpha male," who told me that my husband sounded like a, "Beta male". Soon we were hatching a plot to turn my husband into our servant. I really didn't think it would be a problem. I had the video from our strapon fiasco as a backup plan and I was convinced my husband would try anything I requested. Boy was I wrong!

He stopped packing after I said I would do anything. Instead, the told me that he was going to keep packing and he was going to leave tonight and to expect that. He said that the only thing I could change was whether he would ever come back. Then he started to berate me. He went on for about an hour and every time that I argued or even just interrupted him, he would pack another article of clothing. I wish that I could say that I quickly grasped that it was not the time for counter-arguments or any of my drama queen antics, but he got all the work clothes and all the play clothes he would need for at least two weeks packed before he was finished telling me off.

He also took check-books and his passport and birth certificate. He was scarily serious.

I won't bore you with everything he said, but the basic gist of it was that I never took responsibility for finding my own happiness. I always made him the bad guy. I employed double standards. I was a walking contradiction; wanting to be treated like an equal, a goddess, a princess or a whore and expecting him to get it just right every time. He was committed to treating me like an equal and that meant not putting up with any bullshit from me that he wouldn't tolerate from his best male friends. It also meant trying to allow me to "liberate" myself from traditional unequal gender roles. Wow! I was flabbergasted. Eventually, I stopped interrupting and just let the torrent flow over me, realizing that his point of view was alien and just as completely logical as I had always known him to be. That logic and the confidence with which he expressed it was one of the things that had attracted me to him in the first place. Just listening to him and realizing that I could not help but agree with him was shaking me to my core.

In his own way, he was so alpha that I was glad he was able to control some of the urges he had to overcome. In the past, I had angered him to the point where he wanted to punch me. I never knew that. He never let it show. But I wished he had indulged in some of the other urges he admitted to. He wanted to spank me, tie me up and fuck me hard, without concern for whether I was aroused or enjoying it. Those were fantasies we unknowingly shared, but he never did any of that because he understood that only a weak man has to treat women like property. That's what really set him off. Property, chattel, slavery. I wasn't his property and he wasn't my property and he would rather walk away and face those consequences than let me subjugate him.

Finally he got back around to the double standards.

"I will not ask you to do for me what I would not do for you. I want to be able to expect the same from you. If you want to have sex with some "better" man, you have the option of divorce. If you want to have another man while I watch, that won't happen until after you've watched me with another woman."

"If you want me to lick your pussy after another guy's cock has been there, well that won't happen until you've licked another woman's sauce off my cock. You tried to blackmail me, so you have to be the one to earn some trust and show some trust. I'm man enough to let you fulfil your needs, but not as an unequal partner."

"You've made it so that the only way I can solve my problem with you and your problem with me that doesn't end up with one of us in jail and the other in Hell is to go away. I'll be gone for at least a week. That's to give you time to think about whether you can provide me with a better option. You gave me an ultimatum, so here's yours. Make me an offer I won't want to refuse or cut me loose."

With that, he picked up his bag and walked out.

I shouted, "Text me to let me know you're okay!" but I was not sure he heard me.

I heard his car start and then he was gone. I was devastated. Unfortunately, I was also horny as hell. His talk about me licking another woman's pussy juices off his cock woke up something very depraved in me and I added it to my bucket list. Unfortunately, I could only accomplish that goal if I convinced him to let me have another chance. But first, I had to take care of business. I got out my favorite toy and replayed in my mind how helpless I felt each time he shut me up by packing another item into his bag. I had the best orgasm I'd had in longer than I could remember.

After I was sated, I did a lot of thinking about what he said. His logic is so different from mine, but I could see how, from his point of view, he could believe he was being completely fair. I was a drama queen. I did have very traditional ideas about how a man should treat his wife in bed and they did conflict with equal rights for women. Yes, that is a double standard, and I knew before I married him that he had a serious bug up his butt about double standards. I did want to hang onto the "women's prerogatives" that drove him away. I needed that attention and the reassurance that he loved me and I thought that, as a woman, I automatically deserved it. He made it clear that I hadn't been earning it and that he would be content to let the house of cards that we called a marriage remain collapsed. It was a sad realization and I tried hard to find a way to blame him for it, but I could imagine each objection he would raise to any point I tried to make and I knew that they were inescapably damning.

Finally I thought about what I had learned about myself that night and whether it offered a way to reverse the trend toward divorce. I found a glimmer of hope in my sexual response to his being forceful and uncompromising and I realized that I could accept inequality and a submissive sexual role and still get the attention that I craved. I realized that I would get that attention while making amends and that I did not deserve better until I earned better. But I could only do that if he would cooperate. I had to find a way to get him to allow me to give myself to him. It had to be a way that didn't compromise his image of himself as being a strong enough man to not be a wife beater.

So I started making plans. I logged into my erotic stories account and informed my cyber lover that things didn't go well and that my husband left me.

I was looking for sympathy, but his reply was, "Damn! I was really looking forward to fucking his ass."

Maybe it's just me, but that killed my desire to ever fuck this guy. I booted him from my friend list and blocked him. I explained my situation to a few of my female chat friends and they encouraged me to follow my heart and several offered to help. I cried myself to sleep that night but, before I fell asleep, I promised myself that I would earn my husband's respect, because realizing that he had come to see me as nothing more than petty and wanty was the most devastating revelation of the night.