How To Get Your Wife To Wear Lingerie Part 2: Do You Understand The Words That Are Coming Out Of My Mouth?

Lingerie = You Gift Wrapped

In yesterday's post about How To Get Your Wife To Wear Lingerie, I laid out a low key behavioral plan to slowly but surely nudge your lady love towards wearing filmy lacey things. But left it with the cliff hanger that it didn't actually work for me.

So just recapping... I was trying my plan of generally paying attention to all her underwear, shopping online together, bargain hunting a few everyday more exciting things, sexing her up good when she did comply, not over focusing on the lingerie itself during sex yada yada yada.

What actually worked was expressing how angry I had become over the issue. That may not sound overly dramatic, but I don't know if I've genuinely snapped at Jennifer ten times in our marriage. We are both easy going people by nature and we both rub each other the right way, so me actually raising my voice at her is a less than once a year experience. I don't yell, I don't hit, just the voice comes up 20% but there's this tone of displeasure that shreds her. She really does like to please me.

I think I really did the anger thing three times in as many months. Plus a couple of aftershock sort of things as well. There's was no "game" intent to it, no part of a behavior modification plan, no pretending to be angry, no idea what would happen. I was just angry because I was angry, and angry because I had been driven to anger when by nature I'm not an angry guy. I tend to anger very slowly but once angry have a hard time shaking it off.

So let me explain... and this is probably more for the ladies reading than the men, but I'll break form and use the pink microphone instead of the blue one for a little bit...

When a man gives a woman lingerie, it is an Indicator of Interest of the highest order, probably second only to the offering of an engagement ring. A man trying to give a woman lingerie is basically saying "I am so totally into you baby, I find you so freaking sexy". When the lingerie gets slammed away in the Lingerie Vault, it's a pretty firm "I don't like that sort of attention from you". OMG that's ouch. It's like the Walk of Shame back across the dance floor, except you just get to lie there in bed next to Mrs As If.

I'm sure if a man gave you flowers and you just took them and fed them through a shredder in front of him, you'd think that was pretty nasty business. Now imagine you kept all the shredded flowers in a special drawer. That's what the damn Lingerie Vault feels like to a man.

Men tend to experience love through sex. Men have far more testosterone and basic horniness than women, but the experience of sex with a woman is one of the primary bonding mechanisms for a man. Women tend to wait until they feel love before moving ahead into a sexual relationship. Men tend to need to have sex before fully engaging in feelings of love. This natural conflict is much of the traditional mating dance.

I'll say it again - lingerie is a male Indicator of Interest of the highest order.

I love you baby. I'm so into you.

Now at this point many women will complain that they feel; too fat, not a supermodel, that one doesn't fit me right, I have stretch marks, I don't feel sexy, yada yada yada. All men hear when woman spout those sort of lines off is, "I don't like that sort of attention from you, and you have poor taste in women". Which is called adding insult to injury.

After a while it really stops being about the lingerie.

A woman can do an awful lot of things for a man because she loves him and likes him, but not much of it counts in his book of love compared to acting like you want to pull his sexual attention.

When men complain "why doesn't she initiate sex?", they may as well also be asking "why doesn't she really love me?"  Oh she may very well love him to death, just the love doesn't come in the language of love he speaks so he never hears her say it right. The road to divorce court is paved with miscommunication.

See to the mind of a man, giving a woman lingerie is like handing her a big red button marked "Easy". All she has to do is push the button and it makes him feel loved, excited and happy. It's incomprehensible to him when she just looks at the big red button and says, "the big red button makes me feel uncomfortable". Then she throws it in the discard pile with the other big red buttons.

Now it's really not about the lingerie at all.

It's not even about sex anymore.

It starts being about everything that is wrong in the relationship.

Plus for me it started being about The Test.

So anyway... darker times. In the end my anger was pretty focused on the message "I want this from you". We cycled through me being angry and her being apologetic a few times. The test faded away to background noise. I'm getting far more of what I want... no, what I need from her. Usually I ask, but sometimes she just does it on her own. It's really not all that frequent we do lingerie night either. About once every 2-3 weeks which is fine. It's a spice not the meal.

Monogamy isn't always an easy road to travel. So help me, help you. It's not about you being or not being a supermodel. Lingerie is just a non-verbal "come hither".

Things have changed for the better between us since all this happened. We have always had a lot of sex, but the handful of more seductive nights tossed in satisfy me better. I just feel some how calmer and more in love with her.

Plus for her part, she's actually starting to like wearing the stuff. Talk about your Green Eggs and Frakking Ham.