Shower Sex: How to Actually Make It Good
The fantasy is steamy but the reality is often awkward—here is how to make shower sex work in real life.
The Gap Between Fantasy and Reality
In movies, shower sex is all steam and perfect angles and water cascading dramatically over intertwined bodies. In reality, it's often slippery tiles, water in your eyes, and positions that looked great in your head but turn out to be physically impossible.
Shower sex can absolutely be hot. It just requires acknowledging the logistical challenges and working with them instead of pretending they don't exist.
The Water Problem
Here's something they don't tell you: water is not lubricant. In fact, it washes away your body's natural lubrication, making penetration potentially uncomfortable or even painful.
Solutions:
Making the Space Work
Most showers aren't designed for two people doing athletic things together. Accept this and work with what you have.
Non-slip mats are non-negotiable. Falling is a real risk and a real mood-killer (or worse).
If you have a shower bench, you're golden. If not, consider installing a grab bar—useful for balance and for, well, grabbing.
Adjust the water temperature slightly cooler than you normally would. Two bodies plus steam plus exertion equals overheating fast.
Positions That Actually Work
Standing face-to-face with one person's leg lifted works in movies, not in real life unless you're the same height and both have excellent balance.
What actually works:
One person bent forward: Hands on the wall, partner behind. Stable, allows for penetration, and keeps faces out of the water spray.
Seated: If you have a bench, one person sits while the other straddles them or kneels in front.
Against the wall: One person's back against the tile, legs wrapped around their partner. Requires strength from the supporting partner, but the wall helps with stability.
Standing side-by-side: For mutual manual stimulation rather than penetration. Less acrobatic, still intimate.
What Works Best in Water
Honestly? Foreplay activities work better in the shower than penetrative sex.
Washing each other is inherently sensual. Soapy hands sliding everywhere. The intimacy of cleaning someone, of being cleaned.
Oral sex can work well, especially with one person kneeling on a bath mat in the tub while the other stands.
Making out under warm water, hands exploring, building toward what you'll do when you get out—that's using the shower to enhance what comes next rather than trying to make it the main event.
The Practical Stuff
Keep a towel within reach for wiping water from faces.
Have your lubricant in the shower—ideally in a pump bottle so you're not fumbling with caps with slippery hands.
Don't try this when you're in a hurry or when the hot water heater has limitations.
And maybe don't try it for the first time when you've been drinking. Alcohol plus water plus new positions plus hard surfaces is asking for trouble.
The Transition
Some of the best "shower sex" is actually shower-to-bedroom sex. Use the shower for the warmup—the steam, the slippery soap, the hands everywhere—then towel off and continue on a surface designed for what you want to do.
Wrap them in a towel, lead them to the bed still damp, and pick up where you left off. You get the benefits of the shower fantasy without fighting the limitations.