Living with a foot fetish, and making my peace with it
A foot fetish is one of the most common fetishes there is. For me, living with it turned out to be less about feet and more about unlearning years of thinking I was broken.
I was maybe eleven when I first caught myself staring at someone’s feet and feeling something I had no word for. A girl in my class had kicked off her sandals under the desk. I remember the specific embarrassment of it more than anything else, the sense that I had been caught at something even though nobody was looking at me.
For a long time I assumed this was a phase that everyone quietly had and grew out of. It was not a phase. It came with me into my twenties, into relationships, into the small private calculations I made about where to look and for how long.
The years I thought something was wrong with me
Nobody handed me a vocabulary for this. I had a vague idea that fetishes were things that happened to other people, usually men, usually in a way that got laughed about. The idea that a woman might have one, and that it might just sit there in her like any other preference, did not seem to exist anywhere I could find it.
So I did what a lot of people do. I decided it was a flaw and I hid it. I dated, I had perfectly good sex, and I kept this one thing in a locked drawer because I was certain that opening it would make me seem strange to someone I liked. The hiding took more out of me than the fetish ever did. There is a particular tiredness that comes from monitoring yourself, and I was tired.
The turn came from something small. I was reading, late at night, and I found a thread of people talking about the same thing in the same plain way I felt it. Not as a punchline. Just as a fact about themselves. One woman wrote that hers had been with her since she was a child and that she had stopped apologising for it. I read that line about four times.
What it actually looks like day to day
I want to be honest that most of my life has nothing to do with any of this. I go to work, I argue with my sister, I forget to water the plants. The fetish is not a fog I walk around in. It is more like a channel that is there when I want to tune into it and quiet when I do not.
When it does come up, it is gentle. A partner’s feet in my lap on the sofa. Being the one who notices, who lingers, who asks. It has never been about anyone being hurt or degraded. If anything it is the opposite, a kind of close attention that I find genuinely tender. People assume a fetish must be dramatic. Mine is mostly soft.
The practical side is smaller than you would think. Consent is the whole thing. I do not spring it on anyone. I do not touch without asking. And I have learned to tell the difference between a partner who is politely tolerating it and one who actually enjoys being on the receiving end of that much focus, which, it turns out, a lot of people do once they relax.
Where I have landed
The first time I told someone I was seeing, I rushed it and half took it back before he had even answered. He just shrugged and said it sounded nice, and asked a couple of questions, and that was that. Not every conversation has gone that smoothly. One person clearly found it a bit much, and we were not right for each other for a dozen other reasons anyway.
What changed was not the fetish. It was me deciding it was allowed to exist. I stopped treating it like a confession and started treating it like information, the same as telling someone I sleep badly or that I love the sea. Given plainly, it lands plainly.
If you have carried something like this quietly for years, the part I wish someone had told me sooner is that you are genuinely not the only one, not by a long way. There are a lot of us, and most of us are ordinary in every other respect. Finding even one other person who says it out loud can do more for the shame than years of trying to think your way out of it.
Questions people ask
Is a foot fetish normal?
It is one of the most commonly reported fetishes, across all genders. Having one does not mean anything is wrong with you, and on its own it is not something that needs fixing.
Do I have to tell a partner about it?
You do not owe anyone a confession. Most people find that sharing it with a partner they trust makes their sex life easier rather than harder, but the timing and the how are yours to decide.
Where does a foot fetish come from?
Nobody can point to a single cause. Plenty of people notice it in childhood, long before it has anything to do with sex, and it simply stays with them.