You think you know what you want in the bedroom, but this isn’t the gym, and you also need to know what your partner wants. Tempt her passion with these tricks and she’ll do more than remember your name.

By Jack Hafferkamp, PhD
Few Reps! readers haven’t felt that moment of inevitability: You’re making out with your woman, going through all those steps you’ve learned to take to get her “ready,” when suddenly the “Popeye effect” occurs. It’s as if your manhood starts signaling “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more” and the only way to hush the insistent voice is to go for the end move. For many guys, these few minutes of activity that precede penetration comprise the sum total of the experience we consider foreplay.
With a quickie in some hidden corner during your office lunch break or in the bowels of a parking deck, such an approach is particularly acceptable—even essential—because it’s fast and dangerous and a little provocative. But at most other times, real foreplay is about making sex hotter for you and her—it’s not merely a preparatory act to knocking boots.
Foreplay is about teasing and stretching out the experience of sex (and not paying attention to Popeye’s voice in your head) to make it more intense and satisfying—for both of you.

Don’t Fire Yet

Foreplay can be subtle or overt, but its aim is to progressively add to arousal. And it doesn’t take Masters and Johnson or Dr. Ruth to tell you that the greater the arousal, the hotter the sex between you and your partner. In this sense, the equation is a simple and direct correlation: The better the foreplay, the better the orgasm—for both parties.
Foreplay can involve a wide range of possibilities, and there is no single set of surefire techniques to make it work. The fact remains that there are an amazing number of ways to add to the pleasure of sex by teasing your lover. Your job is to borrow some—any or even all of these ideas—and adapt them to the real-life connection you have with your partner.

Categories

You can slice and dice foreplay into assorted categories and possibilities, but to avoid making our exercise feel like a class in algorithms, think of foreplay as a set of two possibilities: the psychological and the physical.
Psychological Foreplay By using elements of psychological foreplay, you can help create a sexy atmosphere between you and your partner—a conspiratorial mood in which both of you know what’s going on and enjoy the process. Whether she’s a new partner or a longtime lover, a great way to get her attention is to let her know that you’re thinking of ways to tease and please her.
Here’s what you need to do in Phase 1:
1. Tell her you think she’s beautiful.
2. Tell her how much you desire her.
3. Make physical contact—touch her. But be subtle here at first: Hold her hand, touch her shoulder and put your arm around her. Don’t immediately go for her breasts or butt.
Then you’re off to the races in Phase 2:
Just remember that the aim of this race is counterintuitive: You’re supposed to go as slowly as possible.
4. Send her a note or email telling her how much you would like to please her. But be subtle here—keep it suggestive, not overt.
5. Leave notes for her in unexpected places: on the refrigerator, in her shoes, in her underwear drawer.
6. If you have a preexisting relationship, take her shopping to buy:
a. Sexy underthings (let her pick)
b. A sex toy (again, let her pick)
c. Erotica (you guessed it: let her pick)
7. Send her a box of erotic chocolates. (You can find them online.)
8. Text-message her an erotic love poem. Be witty and brief, but skip the limericks.
9. Play footsie with her under the table when you’re with friends.
10. Kiss her deeply when you’re in a public place.
11. Take a weekend trip together to a place where no one knows you and you can be overt about being lovers.
12. To really blow her away, try creating a perfume just for her. You can do this by finding a local store that sells essential oils and working with the salesperson to mix up something original. Apply that perfume to your partner’s neck.
13. Take her to a nice restaurant and ask her not to wear panties.
14. Make her dinner. Women love men who cook for them. Prepare sexy foods and feed them to her:
a. Steam mussels
b. Offer asparagus spears
c. Split open figs and serve with crème fraîche. Joke with her about what split open figs look like. Be subtle—use the language of seduction, not the locker room.
15. Role-play. Each of you can take on a different persona, such as Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, a mean boss and a bad secretary or, for the more adventurous, the good old master and slave (leather, anyone?).
16. Blindfold her and read her an erotic story. Put pen to paper and write your own—she’ll be dually impressed.
17. Watch an erotic movie together.
18. If your partner is a longtime lover, arrange to meet her as if you were strangers in a hotel lounge. If the role-play works, you’re only a credit card away from a room.
19. Set a romantic after-dinner scene with candles and appropriate
mood music. Slow-dance with her and tell her that she’s beautiful. Nuzzle her neck.
20. Cover her bed in rose petals. You’d be surprised at how inexpensive over-the-hill roses can be from your neighborhood florist and just how effective this gesture can be.
21. Arrange an erotic photo or video shoot. Take turns being the model and photographer.
22. View the results together.
Physical Foreplay
Inevitably, there will come a time for you to move on to physical foreplay, eliciting physical sensations and generating them. But here again, the aim is to slow down and smell those rose petals—or your partner—along the way. These suggestions move from the psychological to the physical, just as the rising tide of passion should.
23. Simply make out. Good old tongue kissing and caressing your partner are time-honored ways to turn her on because they work.
24. Dry-hump—that is, rub against her with clothes on. Work your leg between hers.
25. Offer to paint her toenails. For many women, this is a very intimate gesture. Unless you’re a pedicure artist, you will paint outside the lines, so be prepared for some good-natured ribbing. If it seems too much for you, then…
26. Offer to massage her feet. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, the way to a woman’s arousal may just be through her feet. Do this slowly and carefully—let her tell you where it feels good.
27. Suck her toes.
28. Massage her neck and back. For some women, feet work; for some, it’s the neck. The fun is in finding out which works for your girl.
29. Strip each other. Doing it while dancing is a nice way to maintain physical contact and diminish any self-consciousness. Remind her how beautiful she looks.
30. Turn the lights out completely and have her explore your body in the dark—or vice versa.
31. Take a bath together. Wash her hair—slowly. This is another very intimate act for many women. Just as slowly, dry off her hair afterward using a very luxurious towel.
32. Gently and lightly explore her body with only your fingertips.
33. Stroke her body with a feather.
34. Test her squeal factor with an ice cube.
35. Touch parts of her body that you have previously avoided—you’ll be surprised what areas tickle her fancy. (Remember that she may insist that turnabout is fair play.)
36. Spank her and tell her that she’s a naughty girl. Start slow and light and build up to increase sensation as she becomes acclimatized.
37. Have her put the condom on you. Don’t like condoms? You’d be surprised how much fun it can be to have your partner unroll it on you.
In the end, a good part of the fun of foreplay is being creative. It’s about finding new ways to tease and please your lover. A truism of great sex is that the more pleased your lover is, the more pleased you’ll be.