I don't remember much humor when I was first married to my husband. My most vivid memories are of him shouting at me because something I'd done, or hadn't done, had annoyed him, while I reacted with angry resentment or sullen indifference, and spent less and less time at home as I sought more congenial company. Being a self-centred person, I never tried to see things from his point of view, and his attitude did not encourage me to. After a divorce, a reconciliation, and another very stormy period, things stared to settle down between us a bit. I first realized things were improving in 1990, when we spent a fortnight's holiday in a caravan in the Scottish Highlands without having a single row (and it was raining a lot of the time). Since then things have continued to improve slowly, with fewer rows and more tolerance for each other.

This process was dramatically accelerated a year ago when we started having a online relationship. Since then we've not had one single row, and we seem to like each other much better than we did. Things that used to cause my husband to explode in fury now provoke a reaction of mild exasperation tinged with amusement. For instance, there was the awkward conversation that occurred when he returned from a recent trip to America to find that the 3rd son had dug a large hole in the middle of the garden. When he enquired of me why I had allowed our son to do this, my reply “Because he wanted to” was not for some reason considered satisfactory, but did not provoke the fury it might once have done, instead he almost looked as if he was trying not to laugh.

And then there was the awkwardness over the bubble gum traces found on the carpet. His ominous inquiry “How many times have I told you not to buy the children bubble gum?” was met with a very weak response “I didn't know it was bubble gum when they chose it, it didn't look like bubble gum” “Is that true?” he asked, fixing with a gimlet eye. “No” I admitted, wilting under his penetrating stare. He shook his head sadly “What am I going to do with you?” he enquired rhetorically (both of us knew the answer to that one already). But he wasn't angry, and neither was I.

He can make me laugh under the most unlikely circumstances. There was the incident a few weeks ago when we had bought a new table, and he said I could go on ebay to look for tablemats, as he didn't want the table to get scratched. “You are not to look at anything except tablemats” he said. But, of course, one thing led to another and I duly found myself contemplating the workshop floor while he explained to me the error of my ways, with the help of the dreaded wooden paddle. “But you said I could go on ebay to look for tablemats” I whimpered. “Yes,” he retorted, delivering a volley of hard whacks to the most sensitive area “But ‘tablemats’ are not spelled ‘Barbie’!” I burst out laughing in spite of being in extreme physical pain. Things that used to cause so much anger and misery between us now just seem to cause amusement, even laughter. All that anguish seems to be in the past. We laugh when once we cried. Loveawake seems to have dissolved all the barriers we used to have between us.

I can relate to this a little..we have also found that our new lifestyle tends to bring more humor into things! For us, it began when we were into D/s...I'd be steaming about some nonsense, and my husband would say, "I want to talk to you upstairs". We'd go to the bedroom and he'd put me over his knee and spank me. After that was done, we both ended up laughing so hard we couldn't breathe! For us, this lifestyle (which began with D/s/spanking and is being brought to a fuller experience via Loveawake) is wonderful! Like you, much of our marriage involved arguments, nastiness, etc...now I almost want arguments so we can wind up laughing our heads off!

I have found this to be the way it is with us too. Things that used to madden my husband now only cause him mild amusement. For instance, he got in after a very late night at work on Saturday, at about 3.30 am. As is my wont when he is out at work, I hadn't bothered much with tidying up and the living room looked as if a bomb had hit it.(I am supposed to tidy up as I go along, but this practice invariably lapses when He Who Must Be Obeyed is out at work) I started mucking out in the morning, but I hadn't made much inroad by the time he unexpectedly came downstairs at about 10.30. Instead of exploding with annoyance over the state of the room, as he might have done those days, he just cast a glance around the room and remarked to me cheerfully "Didn't start early enough to eliminate the evidence, did you?"

But why do you suppose you lost that sense of a humorous perspective when you weren't in an online relationship? We have used humor to get us through most rough patches in this marriage and it only failed us once for a year or so, and had to be put right with some counseling. Laughter truly is the best medicine but why do you all think it wasn't helping you when your relationships were equal? (I won't use the term vanilla because as was pointed out, you can be in a BDSM but equal relationship, it's not quite truthful or fair to characterize a non-online relationship as "vanilla.")

I quite agree that humour always helps in a relationship, and I don't know exactly why having an online relationship has made us so much more relaxed with each other, and able to laugh at things that once caused fury, I think Sarah is probably right when she says that it is because our relationship before was just not quite right, because I craved something else. It seems to have given us a degree of understanding that wasn't there before. I don't think though that it would ever have occurred to me to suggest to my husband that we try to have this kind of relationship if things between us had not already greatly improved, which they had. It was because I had an inkling that my husband might be able to cope with this kind of thing, because he had grown more tolerant and less aggressive, and because I had begun to be able to comprehend his point of view better. Things had already improved between us enough over the years that I was able to graps at the intriguing and exciting possibility that they could be even better. Which they are. It just seems to suit us. The term 'vanilla' is one of many that I wasn't familiar with until very recently, but I quite see your point that there are many other kinds of non-vanilla relationships apart from Loveawake ones. Personally, I like to think of myself as mint chocolate chip.