Your experience does sound similar to mine in the early years of my FLR. I am sorry to hear that it did not work out for you in the end. It took patience and gently persistence from me to get my wife to fully embrace her dominance. Just as you had noted, I also was the one that would eventually ask to get things back on track when we faltered. However, a very exciting day for me was the first time my wife came to me and said she wanted to get things back on track because she missed having me serve her. It was at that point that I knew we had turned the corner in our FLR and things were starting to click with her being dominant. One thing that helped us stay on track was establishing a few key weekly routines that we tried to always do. Examples include a weekly review session, weekly massages for her, and corner time for me. For all these routines I am naked or wearing silky panties or wearing collar and cuffs. Dressing this way or being naked helps to create the dominate/submissive mindset.
The review session consists of her holding my cock while she reviews how well I served her during the week (chores, attitude, followed rules, etc.), and to set expectations for the upcoming week. If she was not pleased with my performance I would receive discipline or punishment. Sometimes the review session only lasted 5 minutes. Having regular sessions was more important than having long sessions. The massage is done in a worship or ritual way. I kiss each body part before massaging it. Once the massage is complete, I kneel by the side of the bed to await further instruction for her. The corner time routine is weekly, and I kneel in the corner for 15 minutes. The purpose of this is to reinforce her dominance over me and for me to spend the 15 minutes meditating on how I can continue to serve her as best I can. Each of these routines are simple and benefit both of us. They are done in ways that bring out her dominance and my submission. No matter how busy we get, we try to keep these core routines going, even if we have to shorten the time or move a routine back one day. If we miss doing a routine one time, it is not a big deal, but if we miss two weeks in a row then we make it a priority to not miss another one. When these routines are in place it helps to keep the other aspects of the FLR going such as me doing chores timely.
Another thing that we do, which I think has helped keep our relationships strong is that we always plan two or three getaways each year with just the two of us. We have done this every year since we’ve been married. When the kids were younger, we would have somebody watch the kids while we went away. The getaways were typically weekend getaways but sometimes we just did long day trips. Sometimes we traveled far and sometimes we just stayed at a local B&B, The getaways serve two purposes for us: The first is just to have fun quality time together, and the second is to indulge deeper into her dominance and my submission. We have kinky fun with a definite theme of me being her slave. We also do fun activities together on the getaway such as go to a festival, see a show, or have a nice dinner. We always come back from the getaways feeling much more intimate with each other and it reenergizes my submissive feelings towards her. I would highly recommend this for any marriage. We did the getaways even before we started our FLR. Prior to FLR, there was not a dom/sub theme at our get aways but the sex was always more wild. Having this time together a few times a year is just a great way to stay connected to each other.