I Hate Shapewear

Spring is almost here, so Victoria’s Secret is pimping out its new bridal lingerie. I LOVE lingerie, so you’d think I’d use my wedding as an excuse to drop big bucks for something lacy and flimsy for sexytime.

But I don’t really have that impulse, maybe because I don’t usually need excuses to waste money on lingerie, so the itch is already scratched, so to speak.  Plus, the common anti-lingerie argument of “you have to interrupt things to put on a costume that you end up tearing off within five minutes” resonates when I think about my wedding night. I’ve said that I think we’ll be too tired after our wedding for sex, but if I’m being honest with you, I want “wedding night” sex so much I bet we’re going to TRY. But I also bet it is going to be terrible, terrible, LAZY sex. There is no way I’ll have the energy to put a costume change into the mix.

[I just realized that I can totally wear some lacy piece of “bridal” lingerie for the night BEFORE our wedding, which we are totally spending together, “tradition” be damned. Man, I’m so good at convincing myself to spend money.]

Anyway, which leads me to the original point of this post: “foundation garments.”

Victoria’s Secret’s “wedding day” collection is mostly lycra and boning and shaping/slimming/smoothing.  Just looking at this stuff makes me feel hot and bothered, and not in the good way.

I’ve worn shapewear before, because my gigantic dress collection involves some sheer or silky numbers that require it.  I think it is hot and uncomfortable. Wearing shapewear is probably the only thing I do in compliance with the beauty myth that I TRULY hate. Well that and plucking my eyebrows. So I only do it very rarely. And under protest.

Yes, I do have swamp ass.

The idea of spending a long, busy, day, with all that drinking and dancing and getting hitched and stuff squished into a spandex tube is really, really unappealing.

My preferred wedding-day lingerie is this:

And maybe those stick-on boob pads. MAYBE. (My dress already has those “bra cups” sewn in from when a model wore it at a bridal show.)

But some tiny part of me thinks “It’s my wedding day! Everyone will be staring at me! If my waist isn’t cinched and my butt isn’t boosted, they’ll JUDGE ME.” This is part is related to the part of me that worries over not fitting into my dress.  That part of me needs to be stopped.

Did you/are you wearing foundation garments under your wedding dress?  Do you want to preach it’s life-changing virtues to me? Or should I resist the siren song of shapewear, follow my instincts and go with lingerie minimalism on my wedding day?

[“Lingerie minimalism” just surged to the top of my search engine hits.]

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Sex Talk Blog Party: Wrap-Up and Reflections

This weekend’s Sex Talk Blog Party went about as well as I could have hoped.  There was ZERO misbehavior, only minimal technical difficulty, and best of all: the conversation was lively, fascinating, and valuable to the participants.

I know I definitely felt a needed release sharing some of this information in writing, and felt a strong sense of community in reading what all of you had to say.  I am fortunate enough to have a lot of outlets for sex talk in my extra-Internet life, but there was something special about this forum. I’m not sure if it was the anonymity or the different sample of voices, but I got something out of the Sex Talk Blog Party I didn’t even know I was missing.

I hope all of you feel the same.  I’d love to have another Sex Talk Blog Party sometime in the future.   Or, if someone else would like to host one on his or her own blog, please feel 100% welcome to do so. Just make sure you invite me.

In the meantime, I’m leaving anonymous commenting on until I run into trouble with it, so don’t worry, it isn’t closing time at the Sex Talk Blog Party just yet.

Thank you all for participating, for following the rules, and for being an amazing group of people.

 

Let’s Talk About Sex

[ I had to use that title. Sorry. Couldn’t be helped]

The wedding/marriage blog community offers such delightful, thoughtful, funny, intelligent conversation on almost every aspect of relationships: the fun stuff, the hard stuff, the scary stuff, the mundane stuff.  But we hardly ever talk about sex. There’s been a couple posts on A Practical Wedding, but not too much on the subject in the individuals’ blogs I read, which I feel are the core of my online wedding community.

I mean, I get it.  Sex is private. You’ve got your own boundaries to consider, your partner’s boundaries, and your readership’s boundaries.

When I put out a feeler about this post on Twitter, the overwhelming response was, “My mom reads my blog!” And THAT is exactly why you have an orphan* blog friend to host an Anonymous Comment-Enabled Sex Talk Blog Party.

[*I do feel the slightest tinge of weirdness writing about sex knowing my mother-in-law Viki reads this blog, but a) in-laws are different b) Viki’s cool c) she doesn’t have to read this if she feels uncomfortable with it.  Hi, Viki!]

So let’s get this party started.  Here are some sex talk items that I’ve previously shied away from discussing on this blog:

• I prefer monogamy.  I want my relationship with Collin to be monogamous for the rest of our lives.  Collin wants that too.  I want to include something about “faithfulness” or whatever no-sex-with-other-people euphemism is appropriate for a family event in my wedding vows.  I feel kind of embarrassed about that, like it is old-fashioned and square. But I know that monogamy will not always be easy and I want the powerful foundation of my wedding vows to help me stick to that value.

• My libido is way higher than Collin’s.  Working this out was the first big hurdle in our developing relationship and it made us much closer.  [This isn’t to say that we “fixed” the problem, I still want sex more often than Collin does, but we got to a place where neither of us feel guilty or embarrassed or hurt by the disparity.] It set the tone for all future conflict resolution in our relationship, and I honestly think set us on the path to marriage.

• If you didn’t hear the story of how we met on the Power Hour Podcast, you may not know that when I met Collin I fully intended him to be a one night stand.  But I had entirely too much to drink that night and puked before we could actually, um, stand.  This story embarrasses me horribly.  I am sparing you most of the humiliating details, but here is one of the best: while waiting for a cab after leaving the bar, I started chatting with some strangers, and I introduced Collin with “This is Collin, he’s going to put his semen in me.” Oh, I am so embarrassed, I have deleted and re-typed that sentence fifteen times.

I am SINCERELY WORRIED about how much a role the humiliating-to-Robin tale of the night we met is going to play in our Wedding Festivities, but it feels too controlling and mean and killjoy-ish to ban all mention of it from the toasts, etc.  So I’ve been trying to own the story, by doing things like sharing it on a podcast and mentioning it here.  It’s not entirely working.  I also have no idea what version(s) of the story I will be telling any potential children, at which ages in their lives.

So please feel free to comment or reflect on any of those items (monogamy, libido differences, initial sexual encounters, sharing sexual stories with family and friends) or anything else under the umbrella of sex talk you’d like to share.  Other ideas: Birth control! Dry spells! Endearing quirks! Is sex with your partner the best sex you’ve ever had? Do you plan to/did you bone on your wedding night? Do you know each other’s “numbers”?

Anonymous commenting will be on for the weekend.  You still need to put something in the name box for your comment to submit (make something up, or go with the time-tested “anonymous”).  I have turned on comment moderation for now, depending on how things go, I may turn it off when I need to be away from my computer to keep the conversation going.

Commenters must follow these rules:

1. Be nice.
2. No judgment. [This is a more specific way of saying “be nice.”]
3. You do not need to be engaged, married, in a committed relationship, or even sexually active to join the party.
4. You do not have to comment anonymously if you don’t want to.
5. You are NOT allowed to impair anyone else’s anonymity.
6. Any comments that violate these rules or any of the basic principles of human decency will either not be approved or will be deleted.
7. Everybody have fun tonight.