I’m in the middle of rewriting my “Why women don’t want sex with us” essay for my writing coach and just this morning I was working on a scene that involves one of my wife’s dresses.
I came home from the coffeeshop to read the newspaper and this “A lesson found in a red dress” column by Jacquelyn Mitchard jumped out at me. She gave a sexy dress she never wore to her sister-in-law with the great bod.
What hurt was the look that my husband and my brother gave her as she twirled. It was familiar. I had seen it. But not for a while. Tears started behind my eyes as I hurried off to fold towels.
As a woman, I never did know how obliged I was for those approving glances, until they stopped. I grieve for them, as I grieve for that red dress.
This is a damn gutsy column for Mitchard to write, with some clever lines like “And my rear end, always the shape of a barn door, now is the shape of an insulated barn door.”
But she’s missing something, as my wife has tended to miss. The old saying “It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with what you have” puts it in a nutshell. Yeah, we men easily shoot “those approving glances” any good-looking, nicely proportioned women in slinky, twirlable or tight-fitting dresses. We’re wired that way.
But the woman we’re in love with — assuming she feels loved (granted, far too often not the case) — has the power get those glances from us no matter her age or shape. If her attitude is “I desire you and I love to make you to desire me” and she takes steps to act sexy and flirt in ways that we like, she’ll get those glances.
When wrinkles and extra weight and whatever else women are self-conscious about tend to dominate their landscape, a sexy, flirtatious attitude still trumps. Ears, ankles, lips, finger and toenails of any age or size are easily decorated with sexy touches. Flat chests or barndoor rear ends can still be adorned.
I tell my wife that a tight-fitting dress is a turn-on for me, so if she needs to buy a bigger dress so she doesn’t feel like a sausage, so be it. It’s her desire to please me that’s the turn-on. I don’t give a shit that she doesn’t look like she did on our wedding day. She’s not about to dress up like a tart in public — societal standards are a bit intimidating, she says — but that’s fine with me. It’s how she tries to make herself look for me when we’re alone that matters.
Mitchard’s husband should try to figure out what he can do so that she considers changing her mind. She’s learning the wrong lesson.