Dear Roe,
I love my wife and I want her to wear lingerie for intercourse but she won’t; how can I get her more comfortable so that she will share this experience with me during our lovemaking?
I appreciate that you’re looking how to make your wife feel as comfortable, confident, loved and appreciated as she can so that she might feel safe enough to explore something that matters to you. This feels like a good place to start a conversation that is loving and exploratory, not cajoling or demanding. Because I do need to stress, you cannot make her do this, she may never want to do this, and your aim shouldn’t be to try convince her to do something she’s really uncomfortable with. Desire, intimacy and the erotic require freedom and choice, and cannot grow in an atmosphere of demand and obligation.
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But what you can do is create a conversation where you understand what eroticism means to both of you, and find a way to connect there. That connection may come in the form of lingerie, or it may come from unearthing a new way of thinking about and experiencing desire, sensuality and each other.
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I understand that requesting that your wife wear lingerie might feel like a small request, particularly because lingerie is a very prominent part of heteronormative sexual scripts. Think of all the ads, music videos, films, TV shows and porn, where a woman wears lingerie in order to seduce, or to be seen as desirable. It’s everywhere. This is a cultural sexual script: lingerie on women equals sexy. And when it’s so ubiquitous, and you enjoy it, it can feel natural, and so a natural thing to want from your wife.
But these things aren’t natural. Lingerie to you might mean sexiness, but to understand what lingerie might mean to your wife, it could help to step back and look at the broader cultural landscape in which both of you learned what sex is supposed to look like. In heterosexual relationships, the labour of seduction is culturally assigned almost entirely to women. The world has trained women, often since childhood, to believe that their desirability is something that must be maintained through constant self-monitoring, effort and investment. There is grooming, shaving, make-up, hair styling, selecting clothing that conforms to certain ideals, weight management and exercise designed to make our bodies conform to certain ideas. There are skincare routines and moisturisers and body-hair removal methods and rituals upon rituals. And then there is lingerie, which is not just a piece of clothing, but a symbol of being visually pleasing, of being seen, of being looked at.
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This is not natural or neutral. This is work, all of it. There is the emotional labour of learning to anticipate the preferences and reactions of others. There are salon appointments, the cost of products, the time it takes to maintain all of it. These costs are invisible because they are normalised and because women are taught not to mention them. And, importantly, there is the question of how much actual life a woman quietly loses to these preparations. Time that could be spent resting, thinking, creating, enjoying herself or simply being. Time that instead goes to managing her appearance in order to meet a set of expectations she did not invent.
Meanwhile, many men learn that their primary erotic contribution is simply that they want sex. The pursuit itself is framed as effort. Sometimes men will point out that they invest money into dating or time into planning, and for some men, this is true. But apart from women actually spending a huge amount of money on being considered desirable before the date even starts, the gendered effort of dating and seduction is different. The kind of effort that comes from deciding where to eat is very different from the kind of effort that requires scrutinising your own body in the mirror and deciding whether it is acceptable to be seen.
For some women, lingerie is delightful and empowering, a chosen expression of erotic play. But for others it can feel silly, or uncomfortable, or like a return to that place of performance where sexuality must be crafted, staged, and perfected rather than simply felt. If she is already weary from the daily work of being seen in the world, lingerie may feel like yet more work. She may want sex to be the one place where nothing extra is required, where she does not have to prove beauty, where she can arrive as herself and know that is enough.
And so one of the most important things you can offer her is appreciation for her as she already is. Not as a costume, not as a performance, but as a living, breathing, feeling person. Tell her what you find beautiful about her. Tell her what her presence does to you. Tell her that the sound of her voice, the warmth of her skin, the way she leans towards you, all of this moves you. Tell her in detail, not generalities – the body responds to specificity. Let her know that you want her, not a stylised version of her.
Then, if she is open to it, ask with tenderness and genuine curiosity. Ask her what does not feel good about lingerie. Ask what part of it makes her uncomfortable. Ask what kind of touch or atmosphere helps her feel most desired. Ask her when she feels most embodied, most powerful, most connected to her own sensuality. Ask her what makes her feel sexy, not just what looks sexy from the outside. Listen, truly listen, to her answers, and try to understand her more deeply. See if you learn anything that you could incorporate into your intimacy with her – ways of approaching her, of making her feel good, ways of thinking about setting atmosphere, tone, rhythm, initiation, presence when it comes to touch, seduction, intimacy, sex. Find out what clothing (or state of undress) does make her feel the most erotic, and play with that. Once she feels your investment in her pleasure, once she feels connect to herself and to you in ways that aren’t performative or demanding, the option of lingerie might feel more fun.
Or not. Lingerie might never be something she’s comfortable with – but if you have these conversations, you may miss out on stockings and suspenders but you’ll receive closeness, vulnerability, intimacy, and the electricity of sexual connection where you both feel loved and desired as you are.
In Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance by Ada Limón, the poet writes to her lover that “sometimes, I think you get the worst of me,” describing her days spent in sweatpants, stained T-shirts, messy hair. But the acceptance, the love, the desire she still receives from her partner allows her to feel completely herself, to connect with her body in a primal way. “I move in this house with you, the way I move in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage. I do like I do in the tall grass, more animal-me than much else.” She is fully embodied, unguarded, alive. But most vitally, she writes, is that when she’s allowed to be herself, unmasked, uncostumed, unperforming, and she is told that she is loved, “for the first time in my life, I believe it”.
The poem reminds us that desire becomes most alive when we are loved without needing to perform. If your wife can feel wanted in that “unmasked” state, intimacy becomes spacious, tender, and real. And if lingerie ever enters the picture, it will be an expression of that freedom, not a condition for it.
