I am not a submissive man. I want to be submissive to one woman

I am not a submissive man. I am a man who wants to be submissive to one particular woman, which sounds like a distinction without a difference and is in fact the whole thing. At work I am difficult. Among friends I am the one who decides where we are going. None of that changes anywhere else.

Forty four, south of the river, an engineer, and I have wasted two years on boards where the assumption is that this is an identity you carry about with you. It is not, for me. It is something I want to give to one person, deliberately, because she has earned it and because it costs me something to hand over.

In practice that means I will not be deferential in the first message, or the tenth, and women who want that will find me insufferable and should. I want to be argued with, out-thought, and then told. If she is right I will do it. If I think she is wrong I will say so once and then do it anyway, and we can look at the result together afterwards.

I had one relationship like that, seven years, which ended when she died. That is the entire reason there has been nothing since, and I am only now in any state to want something again.

Not looking for a woman who needs a title from the outset. Not looking for anyone who wants a man who is soft all the way through. Not looking to be set tasks by a stranger, because that is not respect in either direction and I would simply not reply.