It's been quiet here lately, for reasons I'll get to later. But in the quiet, someone asked:
"How exactly did the 6 of you meet, discover your joint interest in spanking and decide to set up this blog?"
As Haron says, we met on soc.sexuality.spanking (a usenet group) where we all either post, or have posted at some point in the last 8 or 9 years (it's an old community by internet standards. We're friends and of course we knew a lot about each other's personal lives from our postings.
The newsgroup is about spanking, but one thing I learned from it is that a lot of people into spanking are *not* into punishment, either for real life issues or even as something to play with. This makes it hard to talk about the idea of discipline and punishment for real life stuff there. A lot of time ends up being taken up with explaining What It Is We Do and also defending it as "real" in some fashion or another. So we never really get around to talking about how to make it work and how it might work for other people.
When Pablo and I got married this past year, I started thinking about how hard it is to work real life discipline and punishment into a relationship and how often over the years we seem to have disappointed each other. At times, these disappointments have moved us both away from even trying. Yet on the other hand, this is such a powerful and such a right part of both our lives and such a good and positive connection between the two of us, we have continued to try. As I got to know sparkle, Haron, Tasha, Natty and Angie, I realized that we weren't the only people struggling with this issue and how to relate to some of the DD information out there that seemed oh so not us. All of us are in disciplinary relationships (or have been) that are long term. Some of us are married, some of us live with our partner. Some of us are in long distance relationships. All of us have done long distance at some point or other and know that pain and frustration.
What I wanted was for us to be able to get together every so often and talk. However, while a couple of us live near each other, for the most part we're separated by national boundaries, large land masses and oceans. And then I realized we could have a blog and maybe other people would want to talk about this too. Plus, with six of us, I figured someone would have something at least every week or two.
Enter TypePad and the rest is history. I'm sorry we haven't been posting a lot lately. Some of us have been ill, dealing with school, traveling or just being too good (??). So there will be ebbs and flows in the blog, just like in relationships.
A good thing.
There, aren't you glad you asked?