Don’t do anything in front of your husband that you wouldn’t do in front of a guest (pick your nose, pass gas, adjust your nylons, pick a wedgie, adjust your bra, use the restroom, etc.). Yes, he will see you get dressed in the morning, which a guest would not see, but be careful to never get so “comfortable” with him, that you show him your grosser actions.
If you managed to behave well before you married him, you can keep it up. To violate this, diminishes you in his eyes, and frankly, diminishes him in yours. If you act better in front of strange men than you do your husband, you will eventually respect them more than you respect your husband.
By the same token, try not to talk in detail about your period or other bodily functions unless you absolutely have to. It isn’t that you are ashamed or your body, it’s just that he really doesn’t want to hear about it, and frankly, by being a little discrete you can transform some rather base aspects of being human into just another element to your feminine mystery.
Familiarity breeds contempt. Discretion enhances the sense of mystique, the strange and marvelous feminine mysteries that a men don’t really understand.
Don’t take him with you for advice when you are getting fitted for a bra. Don’t let him see all the little steps that go into the finished product. Not that you can’t ever groom yourself with him in the room, just be mindful of what you are displaying. Putting on a spritz of perfume while he watches, can be alluring. Putting on control top pantyhose? Not so much. If it isn’t an attractive step, very discretely work things around so that you are in private when you get to that part. Don’t be obvious that you are shutting him out, just engineer it so that he isn’t there for those things.
Also by not doing something things around him, he is never confronted with the fact that you aren’t naturally the way you appear in the end. Of course he knows that your eyebrows aren’t naturally perfect, your nails naturally shaped and polished, your armpits naturally hairless (now shaving your legs can be rather sexy, but it is harder to shave your pits in a sexy fashion), and your teeth clean and white. His head knows these things, but until he is confronted with the process of how it becomes that way, it is still a bit of a mystery.
Have you ever been fascinated by something, and then learned about how it was done or made, and then it lost all its mystery? Why do we buy fancy products when we have simple ingredients around the house which are not only cheaper, but often work better? There is a fascination to a fancy package, a promise, an alluring name, and contents that you don’t quite fully understand. While this can work against us with household products, you can put this phenomenon to work for you with your personal habits.
In the same vein, there are some unbecoming jobs that are necessary for daily life. It’s not the end of the world if her sees you do them, but by connecting yourself with them, you slightly diminish yourself. It doesn’t paint you in the most flattering light for him to see you cleaning the toilet or scrubbing the kitchen floor. It’s not a big deal, but if you can find ways to do those less attractive tasks when he isn’t around, do it.
Now if he does see something you would rather have concealed (which he inevitably will from time to time), don’t get flustered or embarrassed. Don’t push him out of the room or try to hide. Be poised, be collected, be graceful, and discretely put aside what you are doing and move to something else. Try not to address it at all, just smoothly go on. You weren’t doing anything wrong, you would just prefer to wait until you have some privacy, to resume what you were doing.
Another benefit of this is that when you reserve the less attractive parts of your daily life to be done in private, you also have a sense of reserving a little part of yourself. This is not a negative thing. We aren’t talking about not including your husband in your whole life, just to retain a little bit of yourself. And that helps keep you from being needy. When you have a sense of some part of your life being private, you respect yourself a bit more. This is true with more than husbands. It also holds for friendships with other girls. Hold a little back, even if it is just plucking your eyebrows and swishing out the toilet. Besides, with girlfriends, when you do get together for a girls night in and you are painting your nails and doing facials, it makes it all the more special because those are not things you take for granted.
You might choose to keep a few other things private too, such as not talking about getting a dress, new lingerie, new shoes, new nail polish, or whatever (if you are married, you shouldn’t hide the fact that you spent money, but being upfront about the finances is different than modeling your new blouse). The reason goes back the mystery of not knowing what goes into the final product. There is so much more feminine mystery to showing up in a dress that your husband has never seen before, than displaying it on the hanger and talking about it in excited tones. You seem so much sexier if you wear some lacy thing to bed that he has never seen, than if he knew about it before. This is because if he knows you bought it, in his mind it is something you have, something separate from you. When it is something you just use, he sees it as a part of you, a part of who you are.
In my spare time I like to write fiction, and one element that you learn in fiction writing is that if you don’t spell out everything, the reader will mentally fill in the details on his own, plus he will be more generous than you would have been. This is the same principle. When you are dating someone, you don’t know every last thing about them. When you see hints of things, you automatically fill in the gaps in your own head. If a man thinks he knows every garment in a woman’s wardrobe, seen all the accessories, he has a “been there, done that” attitude towards her. She is no longer a mystery like she used to be. If she lets him know about every change, every addition, as soon she brings it home, he still always knows everything about her. If she just shows up in things that he’s never seen (and this can extended to other areas of her life), his mind won’t automatically say “okay, now I’ve seen it all again”, it will say “well if I didn’t know about that, what else do I not know about her?” As long as he never has reason to ask that about her morals or her character, that kind of mystery is a very very good thing.
Another way to keep a little mystery about you is to not talk so much. If you are always giving your opinion of everything that catches your attention, eventually he will have heard pretty much everything you have to say on every subject. Being married to you will become like watching the same episode of a TV show over and over and over and over again. After a while, you know every line and you are utterly sick of seeing it. Not only that, but when you get really sick of that episode, you will never be able to really enjoy it again for the rest of your life. That is the last thing you want a person to think about you.
That last point is especially hard for me because I tend babble on endlessly. If I stifle it up too much, I come to resent my husband because I feel like I can’t “be myself”. The key is to step back and remind yourself that you are not closing your mouth because you are trying to become a perfect little silent and submissive servant, but that you are keeping some of your thoughts special and treasured. You must focus on the fact that holding some things back is a way of treating yourself with respect, rather than flinging the entire contents of your mind out there for him (or anybody) to notice or discard as he pleases.
A little unpredictability is very alluring. Knowing everything a person is going to do before they do it is a fast track to finding them boring. Yes, a person should know their spouse’s character inside and out, but if you are constantly surprising him in other areas of your life, he is constantly challenged because he has yet to completely plumb your depths. What this means is that you must always have some little bit of unpredictability about you. Unpredictability is fascinating. It doesn’t have to be big things, just occasionally making a food he’s never had before, taking an afternoon by yourself and going to the theater or a museum that you’ve never been to, wearing a new article of clothing he’s never seen, styling your hair differently, doing some form of exercise you’ve never done, reading about new subjects so you always have new things to talk about, etc.
But don’t just put on a display of unpredictability. Vary your life for your own sake. It is exciting and enriching. Life is change. If you aren’t changing you are dying. And on top of that, develop the habit of discretion so that he gets the impression of more variety and unpredictability than there really is.