My Fiancé Has Developed a Baffling, Childish Way of Initiating Sex. I Dread It.
How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Stoya and Rich here. It’s anonymous!
Dear How to Do It,
My fiancé has a very childish way of initiating sex, and it turns me off. I feel like it wasn’t like this 10-plus years ago when we weren’t dating but were friends with benefits.
His idea of “foreplay” is bothering me like poking me and booping me on the nose, and it’s usually when I’m settling down to go to bed. When I finally begin to get in the mood, the foreplay I actually enjoy gets cut short. When he slips his fingers inside me, it starts to feel uncomfortable. This seems to be our only issue, but I also don’t want to hurt his feelings/making him feel awkward. Where do I go from here?
The subject of reasons why heterosexual men suddenly forget how to exert erotic effort that they have thoroughly demonstrated capacity to engage in remains both fascinating and irritating to me. I wasn’t there several years ago, and time does often distort our recollections, but I expect that your sense that your fiancé’s approach has changed is accurate. If you want the way he initiates sex to change (or change back, really), you’ll have to communicate that desire somehow.
You might hurt your fiancé’s feelings to some extent, make him feel awkward, or otherwise cause him discomfort by broaching this subject. But he is currently making you feel—in your own words—bothered and uncomfortable, and possibly causing other negative feelings, over and over, when he pokes you, boops you on the nose, and puts his fingers inside your body in a way that doesn’t work for you. The question is whether you’re going to tolerate this (or a continued drift toward Bozo-like antics) for the sake of sparing him the slight singe of being informed that his behavior is less than enjoyable. The longer you let this go, the more he’s likely to feel shame, which he might express as, “This obviously isn’t a problem, because if it was, you should have told me earlier,” “Where is this coming from?” followed by an explanation of how you’re wrong about what you prefer, or “Oh gosh, I’m such an obtuse idiot, why didn’t you let me know so I could stop bothering you?” Those first two types of reactions are signs that your fiancé’s immaturity might be part of how he engages in life outside of the bedroom, too. If you’re expecting something along those lines, and that’s behind your reluctance to speak up, you’ve got a bigger problem, and this funny form of foreplay is a distraction.
Have this talk as soon as possible, ideally, before he pokes you again. Or, the very next time he pokes you, let him know you don’t enjoy it, and it turns you off.
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