How to Ravish Your Wife

An anonymous guest post

In response to previous guest posts, I had an individual reach out asking if I was interested in anonymous submissions, and provided the following. Because I thought it was full of useful, practical insights, I was happy to publish it!

---

Much of the sex writing on Substack represents the unmarried, the polyamorous, or the married and unfulfilled. Long-term monogamous and sexually satisfied couples don’t have much reason to talk about it publicly, which might lead one to assume it never happens. Here I offer a corrective, in the form of advice to my fellow husbands:

1. Make everything else melt away

• “Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them"

• Understand that sex is much riskier for women than men

• Sex with the wrong man is a life-scale decision for women, the sort that men only make in movies about whether or not they should invent the atomic bomb

• This can make it seem like a woman wants the physical act of sex less than you, when in fact she’s just facing a massive intertwined decision matrix

• When women feel comfortable enough to really release themselves into sex, it is an affirmation of trust and commitment which permits a profound heart-opening that few men naturally relate to

• This is when good sex happens

• As you get deeper into marriage, the blockers for relaxation move from fears of violence or unwanted pregnancy and towards fears the marriage isn’t healthy, like the deep subconscious relational stuff but even issues as prosaic as chore imbalances, which lead to fears the relationship isn’t built on shared respect

• Growth in this domain is a mutual process not personal/private; candid conversations, inner work, therapy — do whatever works in this zone because in order to truly relax you’ll both need a lot of openness and introspection about your marriage, your body, your memories and feelings about sex

• Notice when you flinch away from your own sexual reactions, consider why you do that, admit to yourself what actually turns you on — which is distinct from what you’ll end up expressing or even hoping for, but at least open up to yourself raw

• Be a good husband in the other realms of married life regardless of how the bedroom is going; don’t bargain or think about sex in transactional terms at all — and I’m just saying this here strictly because it will make the sex worse

• If you want sex like the early days you better be as all-in and chivalrous as you were then, which gets harder as life gets harder, but a hard life is better with a partner you feel incredibly close with, and there’s no real substitute for the closeness that results from good sex in deep marriage

2. Learn to yearn

• Masc/femme isn’t a binary or even a spectrum, they’re separate axes and you should be maximizing both

• “Men are visual” is a misleading simplification of a truth that’s more accurately phrased “men think they are merely visual”

• Women are also visual and men are also non-visual, but only men are confused about both of these facts

• Learn from your wife, open up to the non-visual/non-physical realms that you’ve been tuning out (yet have been powering you this entire time)

• Likewise allow your model of her to be visual and physical and feral

• Read/watch Pride & Prejudice, or at least David Lynch

• Once you get how much sex and commitment/life/death are tied together — because it is for men too if you’re being really serious and honest — you can access the profundity of yearning, the sexiness of yearning

• Spend time fantasizing about her, not in some physical act but in sexually charged romantic situations, cinematic type shit, listen to the soundtrack the scenes would have

• Just for fun when you’re on the couch together, privately imagine that you aren’t dating yet and like some goofy high schooler you aren’t sure if she even likes you in that way, and notice with excitement the gentlest brushes of her skin against yours

• Savor the feelings of wanting her as a pleasurable sensation in and of itself, several times a day, then tell her honestly that you thought about her all day

• Work through your side of the fear equation, the fear of being laughed at (surely the lesser burden!) and learn how to do dirty talk in a way that works for both of you; confess some of these silly fantasies, not bedroom requests, but sexually resonant narrative/emotional/social/power stuff, or just memories of the best sex you’ve ever had together

• Yearning and flirting brings a lot of the fun of sex into ordinary life, keeping the flame lit all day and making the bedroom pre-charged when you finally end up there

• The further you get into a happy and healthy marriage and the more intertwined you become, notice and appreciate how individuated and irreplaceable your relationship has become, how much more fated it seems in retrospect, how insistent and clear you’d have been at the start of your relationship if you knew how much you’d come to depend on each other, how long you’d have stood in the rain

3. Don’t “have sex”

• I’d bet a lot of money the best sex you’ve ever had was defined by being especially spontaneous — that’s “The Trick” if there is one

• Good sex is a result of intimacy, not a method for creating it

• First focus on closeness, presence, witnessing her energy, curious and playful

• Then discover and follow whatever is immediately, observably, mutually pleasurable

• In the here and now, not what worked last time, or what you were hoping for, or what you read that “women” like, or even what she’s said she likes in the past

• Women understand their bodies are constantly fluctuating but they actually can’t anticipate or articulate how this will change what they want in bed, but it’s very very dynamic! I cannot overstate how minuscule the difference I’m referring to is — millimeters of distance and grams of pressure will vary in effect by the day

• (Men’s preferences are also less stable than they think, but it’s less extreme)

• Slow down, use lube

• If that romantic play evolves towards sex, congrats! If the sex leads to orgasm, that’s nice, but it’s also fine if 0 or 1 people climax; don’t let expectations crush spontaneity

• Don’t make every slightly sexual interaction the start of a snowball that leads to penetrative mutually-orgasmic sex, forcing her to split every little kiss into an EV calculation about the whole enchilada

4. Don’t do “what she wants”

• Sex is not a video game boss fight where your job is to figure out what “she likes” and then do that “to” her with the right sequence of actions

• What many women want most of all is “to be wanted” — sex that’s an expression of your desire for her

• However, if you genuinely desire her you'll also naturally take great pleasure in her pleasure, so focusing on her pleasure should be pretty aligned your own desires

• This is only as paradoxical as riding a bicycle, mostly just very dynamic and self-reinforcing once you get going; it’s the difference between pleasuring her because you think it’s her boss fight timing pattern and pleasuring her because you enjoy being the one to do it

• It’s not very hot to ask her what she wants, just take responsibility for playing around and respond to what’s pleasing both of you here and now

• And as you notice and appreciate her pleasure, make sure to express your pleasure on your face, with the sounds you make, the words you say, etc. — dudes are too quiet, especially if they’re too fixated on whether or not they are pleasing her and not taking time to enjoy her pleasure (which will please her)

• Don’t do shit that makes her think actively about climaxing, especially not anything that makes her think you’re getting impatient holy shit

• Notice that she finds you attractive, in some aspects much more attractive than you find yourself; enjoy that and use it to learn to see yourself as attractive, and men in general as beautiful

5. Don’t do “what you want”

• Likewise, being “dominant” isn’t “doing what you want” i.e. doing some preferred act because you’re “a guy who enjoys X”

• It also isn’t play-acting at some 50 Shades archetype and making her obey commands, or doing some violent physical act

• Sexy dominance is being the kind of person who pursues what he wants and can get anything he wants, and conveying that what you want most of all is her

• This is an energy you are cultivating, not a true fact about your social standing

• Energy is the most important “woo” concept that people ignore

• Drench yourself in fantasies of your wife, feel them in your whole body, and from that place tell her what you want to do to her

• Or tell her what you want her to do to you — that’s just as potent if you've conjured the energy in yourself; it’s not about being a dom or top per se, just the energetic first-mover

• Forget introducing new toys and positions, that’s hedonic treadmill bullshit, if you do this right kissing her neck will be a peak experience

• You can kiss like you’re a vampire taking a victim or like a knight prostrating before his queen, the basic act is nearly irrelevant to the energetic-emotional-narrative-power elements

• E.g. “choking” isn’t about depriving oxygen or causing pain or even about touching the throat, its about playing at taking control of her body, which can be sold as a performance with the slightest bit of real pressure (and on many other areas of her body)

• Escape the frame that “individuals” are having “their” “wants” met — there is no vampire without victim; you’re co-creating/discovering a unified energetic performance, one that likely depends on some form of asymmetry between the two parties to heat up

• Cast yourselves as parts in a sexy story and treat her like your character would — not fake names and costumes and shit just energetically, and with the lightness of “committed play” not some essential expression of how you see your marriage or Women

• This will naturally lead you to the appropriately hot “act” that makes her shake and cry and want to cook a meal for you after — it won’t necessarily be something either party had as “a want” prior to the first kiss, but rather something that spontaneously emerges between your mutual spiraling and engulfs you both

• Great sex is an experience of union; loosen the distinction between your bodies, see if you can feel the sensations of her orgasm as if it were your own

• Feelings of union, and good sex generally, ripple outwards into every other realm of your relationship, strengthening your mutual devotion and also your ability to influence each other in healthy ways, reinforcing long-term monogamous bonding

• I know I said it’s not like a boss fight but it kinda is like getting extremely good at a co-op game with your bro, only your bro shares your bed and the console is your souls — and what’s the chance you’ll make that work with some rando?!