Why I signed over all of my assets and half of my income to my wife

Living the Findom life for real without the kink! Wanting her to be free.

Fellow blogger Nuttykitten posted recently about managing the finances as a sub for the couple she is in with her Dom.  You can find the original post here.  We started discussing the points she raised, and that is what led to this latest bout of introspection.

My wife likes to tease me by telling me I studied “Women’s Letters” at university.  A subject she professes to not understand.  Mostly, she just likes to tease me.  But behind the teasing she knows there lies in me an ocean of feeling for women and femininity.  And with all good teasing, there is quite a bit of truth to the fun.

Our university years are perhaps the most important years of independent thought.  For the first time we get to fly free from the constraints of parental judgement or protection.  For the first time we are in a completely new and independent setting.  For the first time we get to try out so many new things, different selves, or just become comfy with our own selves.

We didn’t have words like non-binary in those days, but my discomfort with being labelled male was not so much physical as political.  Yes, I hated my body, and ached beyond belief to just wake up one day as a woman.  But the politics of being male bugged me almost as much.  

Up until that point in my life, there were not many men who had been in my life who were positive role models.  My father was a bully, a cheat, and a belittling man who I found weak.  [I still think he’s weak, but I can enjoy his company].  Most of my mother’s boyfriends were a@%$@h£!s, chosen more for their potential to provide financial security than anything else.  My mother dated a lot when we were growing up, as she was trying to secure her financial future.  I wrote about how that made my male siblings think of our mother as a whore, but how it made me feel bitter pain for her.

It bothered me to the core that my mother, this incredibly beautiful, spunky, creative woman, felt that she needed to act submissive, to sublimate herself, to attract the attention of a man.  She was not submissive.  Watching her bury herself was heart-wrenching to me, very confusing, even if I couldn’t fully process it at the time.

And I remember that many of these men were macho, posturing, and just not in her league, but she put up with it, made us all put up with it, because being a single mother on a low salary is no fun.  We grew vegetables in an allotment because we couldn’t afford to buy them.

It fed my sense of teenage injustice, and by the time I left for university, that righteous anger was ready to come out.  I didn’t know the word misandrist at the time, and I may well be one.  [Incidentally, when Mistress told me that she loved men and was not a misandrist, I felt a kind of mental re-ordering taking place, which is making me understand my position better].  What I didn’t like was male norms, male behaviours, male stereotypes, and above all, male privilege.  “Women’s letters”?  Yeah. Sure.

The idea that my mother, educated at one of the top English-language colleges in the world; from a good, solid family; in possession of confidence and wit; and of indubitable physical appeal—no, she was a bombshell, had to bow down to male privilege so that she could survive, struck me as primordially wrong.  Why weren’t people picketing in the streets?  Why was this acceptable?  Why was it the way things were?  I was outraged.  And based on the men in my life, men simply did not deserve the awesome privilege that came with male privilege.  They were scalawags, the lot of them.

[Oh, the pain of being born in a male body—I must have done something terribly wrong in a previous life to be punished in this way!]

I couldn’t bear the thought that I might someday contribute to this awful systemic suppression of women. Income inequality may not have been talked about so much in those days, but it was very real, as was access to decent jobs. I post about income inequality here.  My potential earnings were much greater, I knew that, but I wasn’t willing to accept it.  And I wasn’t willing to have that potentially colour the most important relationship of my life (the one where I partner with someone to create life and to raise healthy and responsible citizens).

One of my closest friends at the time went on in life to become a major national figure in the Women’s movement, and at the time, was one of my favourite “long talk” friends.  It was in conversation with her over a few years that the practical steps I took came to be.  And with her help I was able to take a feeling of personal injustice and turn it into a code of living.

I knew what I wanted in a partner.  A woman with an incredibly strong sense of self.  A woman who had no shame.  A woman who was strong to the core, deeply comfortable in her own skin, with no axes to grind.  A woman who was feminine and not interested in hiding it.  A woman who had wings to fly and was willing and able to use them.

And my greatest fear?  That she might lose that. What if I had just enough of my father in me to undermine her?  What if society conspired to crush her spirit as it does to so many women?

So, I decided that half of everything I made was going to go to her.  Not a join account, but half of everything for her to do what she wished with.  Throughout, she kept her own earnings.  After, we might take each other out as things fancied us, and I paid for the main household bills, and then, after the children came, she paid for most of their upkeep.  This didn’t mean that there was no discussion of money, there was.  But when she stopped working because we had children, it was important to me that she continue to have financial freedom.

When we bought a home we put it in her name for the children.  I had total faith that she would not leave me, and though at times I felt a little financially exposed, I also felt that this was a good motivator for me to behave in a most loving manner, and not fully trusting my own background, this was a good thing.  Worst case, the kids would get things eventually, and anyway, if we were going to ever get divorced, it was 99% likely to have been my fault, so whatever pain I suffered should reflect that.  In other words, I didn’t want her to be put through what my father put my mother through.  Oedipus Complex on overdrive.  And having lived those values, I am now in a place where my wife tells me what to do with my money, and she does what she wishes with hers, and in truth, I don’t care, even if I pay for everything, because we are one.  I’ve been living a Findom life ever since I got married!

I made a commitment when I married her…to have and to hold…in sickness and in health…I’m never going to let go, and I will continually create the conditions that require me to earn my wife’s love every gosh darned day.

There is nothing more important to me than commitment. You make it, you live it. Fulfilling a commitment, even when it is hard, especially when it is hard, is the essence of love.  Being committed to my wife drives why she is the only person I would lay my life down for.  I made a forever commitment to her, and I look forward to growing old with her, and being her best friend until my last breath is gone.  And the money/budget thing?  I won’t be the one to stand in my wife’s way.  I need her to be the most powerful she can be because being married to an incredible woman is a big part of who I am.  Her love means so much more to me knowing that she is with me because she wants to be, and knowing that if she didn’t want to be, if she was unhappy, she could just fly away.

Securing her financial freedom for her is a big part of that.