Having a baby is always a profound experience, but having a first child is physically and psychologically overwhelming. Birth ends the strange physical metamorphosis that is pregnancy, but it marks the beginning of a whole new way of being. There is, of course, stupendous amounts of love for your newborn, but there is also breastfeeding, mastitis, hormonal chaos, postpartum depression, sleep deprivation, colic and general anxiety punctuated by moments of terror. When women leave hospital they are told to avoid sex for six weeks, but when you feel wholly responsible for keeping a tiny fragile human alive, sex is the least of your priorities.
It’s an overwhelming time and your lack of desire is not at all unusual. It might be an idea to talk to a GP about how you are feeling in general, but I suspect that all you need is more support and more time to yourself. According to research with 1,535 first-time mothers that was conducted in Australia, most (78%) had attempted to have vaginal sex within three months of giving birth, but only 12.7% described the experience as “extremely” pleasurable. In parallel, when researchers explored how relationship satisfaction changed during that time, they found that in the first 18 months after having a baby, women who were happy with their partner’s contribution to household tasks were more likely to report high levels of emotional satisfaction and sexual pleasure, as were women who had some time for themselves every week.
It sounds as though you may feel guilty about your lack of desire, but you don’t say much about how you feel about your partner – or whether you think he could be doing more to support you and the baby. Sometimes men can feel excluded from the mother-child dyad, but rather than continuing to attempt to get involved, they retreat. It’s a dynamic that can carry on ad infinitum unless you make a conscious decision to let your partner share the load. If this could be what is playing out, allowing your partner to do more would give you some much-needed space for yourself, and it would increase the likelihood of your libido restoring. No one can run on empty for ever, so however hard it is, you need to take yourself away from your baby. Go for a walk. Meet friends. Go for a swim. Sit in a coffee shop and read a book. It doesn’t matter, as long as you can begin, gradually, to reclaim a sense of bodily autonomy.
Getting some time to yourself will also help to quell that discomfort at being touched. At that point, the focus can move to reclaiming your relationship with your partner. Going out for dinner once a month isn’t enough. You need more than a few hours alone. When you feel ready, leave the baby at home with someone you trust and book a night in the nearest hotel. Neither of you may feel like having sex, but not having the baby with you exponentially increases the possibility. Create the right conditions for sexual arousal and sexual desire will grow. You might also get a postcoital full night’s sleep, which will do you both the world of good.
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