The Truth about Choreplay

Two levers, one wife

This is the 6th installment of the Optimally Fuckable Husband Project’s implementation guide. Check out the first post, What is the Optimally Fuckable Husband Project?, if you want to start from the beginning.

The first time I heard the phrase “choreplay” was six months into The Optimally Fuckable Husband Project.

I had been keeping the marriage subreddit up to date. Tons of people were following along, some joining it, but there was a common, one word comment I’d get on my posts.

“choreplay”.

For the uninitiated (which I was a year ago) choreplay is a criticism of how many men view contributing to the house. It’s the notion that some men expect that they have earned sex by doing the dishes or vacuuming.

The thing is, that criticism is sort of misplaced.

I never thought I earned sex by doing chores. I just knew that the messier the house was, the less my wife was going to want to do the nasty.

I interacted with a lot of those criticisms. And on the other side of those conversations, I realized lots of men don’t actually know what levers they can pull to help make their wife more attracted to them.

There’s nothing you can do to guarantee more sex. That’s in part why this is called The Optimally Fuckable Husband Project. “Fuckable” is an identity. You can be fuckable. That’s something you can control. But you can only influence the propensity of your wife to want to smash.

There are a thousand levers, knobs, and dials that make up your wife’s libido, but there are two specific levers that husbands can pull to increase their fuckability.

Lever 1 - How attracted she is to you.

Lever 2 - How conducive to banging her environment is.

You can’t affect her hormones. You can’t affect someone who’s mentally already left the relationship. But these two levers will take you very far.

And the good news is that whether these levers improve your sex life isn’t even the point of TOFHP. These two levers are not only attached to your wife’s libido, but they’re attached to your own quality of life.

Let’s break down exactly what the sexy sexy science says about these levers and your influence over them.

Lever 1- How attracted she is to you:

Get a fit upper body:

Working out is the hallmark activity that benefits you and makes your wife more attracted to you.

I don’t care what your wife says. She’s probably not a chubby chaser, it’s unlikely she likes a dad bod more than a strong guy. Research consistently shows that muscular men are perceived as significantly more attractive than less muscular men.

One of those studies lined up a bunch of shirtless guys, and obscured their faces. The guys ranged from scrawny to overweight, to jaw droppingly muscular (though none were body builders).

Women were asked to rate how strong the men looked and how attractive they were. How strong a man appeared accounted for 70% of his bodily attractiveness. Height helped a little. Excess weight hurt. But the dominant factor was looking strong.

There wasn’t even an upper limit. The more upper body strength they appeared to have, the more attractive the women found them. Zero out of 160 women preferred weaker-looking men. Literally not one.

The results were not subtle. If you want your wife to want you more, get a strong upper body.

Don’t act like a dependent:

Making sure you are taking care of your own shit will save you from one of the biggest turn-offs wives experience.

Wives are often the default provider for childcare and appointment setting and cleaning up messes. She’s filed these away as totally fine because it’s for her kids. They depend on her.

But research from 2022 shows that women will start to conflate their husbands as dependents if they are doing these same activities for them. And when their children and their husband get put into the same category, sex becomes another chore she has to do to take care of her husband.

When doing more housework led to lower desire (which it often did) almost half of that connection was explained by wives viewing their husbands as dependents.

That means there are three ways to stay out of this libido-killing category:

First, share the housework. This research focused on women who were already doing more. Keep her from shouldering a disproportionate load and this pathway doesn’t activate.
This is especially important when both spouses are working full time.

Second, take care of your own shit. If she has to do it for the kids, don’t make her do it for you.

And third, don’t be someone she has to manage. Proactive action, seeing what needs doing and doing it, is the antidote to her filing you as a dependent.

Touch her when you don’t want sex

Many marriage therapists describe a common pattern in couples with mismatched sex drives: the wife stops enjoying any touch because it’s always interpreted as an engagement for sex. As one therapist put it, “Your husband walks by you in the kitchen, gently pats your backside, and your brain goes straight to ‘He’s expecting sex tonight.’”

It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially when husbands are rejected for sex several times in a row.

Husbands start to pull away physically because they don’t want to be annoying or get rejected again. Then, once they feel like they’ve given her enough space, they start touching her again, because now they’re ready to make a move.

And because they haven’t non-sexually touched their wives in a while, this validates the pattern that annoyed their wife in the first place.

The key is to break the patterns. Introduce intimate touching that has no strings attached.

If you’re in the cycle, it’s up to you to break it. Humans are pattern recognition machines. There’s no way to convince her you’re not guilty of this without demonstrating it.

I implemented this in my own marriage and after breaking the cycle, I’ve seen one thing lead to another just because she knew there was no ulterior (Okay, sometimes there was an ulterior motive).

Lever 2 - An environment conducive to sex having

Be a kick-ass dad

Parenting stress impacts men and women quite differently. The most important difference for our discussion is in desire. Parenting stress has significant impacts on women’s libido and essentially no impact on men’s.

A major contributing factor to that reduction in women’s libido was that they just didn’t have any room left in their exhausted brains to think about sex. This can be especially prominent in Single-income households where it is the wife’s job to be the default parent.

To alleviate this, you need to give mom the free time and space away from the kids. This means proactively stepping up to take them to doctor’s appointments. Or making the kids disappear randomly to give mom a break.

The good news is this means spending quality time with your kids. More of it. Much more of it. If you can give your wife the mental space, she can finally realize that she could be sexing the guy who is stepping up to give her breaks.

Constantly thinking of kid activities is tough. I wrote about strategies to make that easier here.

Fix the shit that needs fixing

This is the big one that the choreplay critics get wrong.

The criticism is that doing the dishes doesn’t get you laid, and they’re right, it doesn’t. But what they’re missing is that the fact that the dishes are in the sink is what’s stressing your wife out. And research, and probably every man’s personal experience, says that it’s the thousand tiny stressors that crowd out your wife’s libido.

Your wife certainly wants you to contribute, but the problem isn’t that you’re not doing the dishes. It’s that the dishes aren’t done. And it’s not just that the dishes aren’t done. It’s that the floor isn’t vacuumed. She’s stressed about work. Check engine light came on. She still hasn’t signed the kids up for soccer. And 35 other things she could rattle off to you right now. And another 100 things that are stressing her that she doesn’t realize are stressing her out.

You can’t fix them all, but by fixing the things that you can fix, you begin removing straw off of the camel’s back. (Your wife is the camel. Did you just picture a camel with boobs?)

Doing this somewhat publicly, though not performatively, also helps. When she sees you handling things without being asked, she stops filing you as another thing she has to manage. You become a partner, not a dependent. And as we covered earlier, that distinction matters for her libido.

For my wife, one of the big things was our golden doodles. They bothered her to no end. If they weren’t tired in the evening, they would annoy her and stress her out. If they were around when the kids were eating lunch, they’d circle them like adorable sharks, which frustrated her to no end.

I reorganized my schedule to take the dogs on walks when the kids were eating, and amongst a ton of other fixes, I could almost see the weight lifted off my wife’s shoulders.

You can’t fix everything, but there’s plenty you can fix. And by being proactive, you will eliminate many of the negatives that are holding your wife’s libido down.

Thinking about TOFHP

I’m not just sharing this research so you can improve your wife’s desire to smash with you. It’s also so that you can truly believe in the fuckable identity you are building.

If you don’t believe these actions actually increase your chances of better sex with your wife, the identity won’t motivate you.

But the key is that all of these actions improve your life whether your sex life improves or not. Your worst case scenario, following just the research in this article, is having the motivation to work out, keeping your house organized, living a life of high agency, having a physically affectionate marriage, and spending more quality time with your kids.

What’s amazing is this isn’t even all the research I’ve found on this topic. There are interesting correlations between your financial stability and the amount of sleep you both get and a dozen others.

The research confirms that TOFHP is onto something. That treating your wife’s desire to bang as the north star leads you to do all the things you probably wanted to do anyway.

Next week we’ll cover transitioning from the motivation of TOFHP, to a disciplined life of being a fuckable husband. Because you can’t survive on motivation forever.