Here’s a commentary article by Gail Rosenblum in the Star Tribune discussing how the first baby changes a couple’s sex life and how that change can even endanger the marriage.
I can close my eyes and nearly re-live the intenseness of mothering our first new baby. Exhaustion, new emotions and drives, the seething conflicting feelings around job vs. home, leftover physical pain from the difficult birth. (And that was just my husband! I had all those feelings too.) And then, going back to work at 8 weeks postpartum threw my fertility signals into an incomprehensible mess. Let’s just say it was a long six months.
Still, I can’t imagine ever thinking that our marriage was at risk because of it. We always knew we’d make it through. I think that marriages are strained in this situation because (a) few couples have experience choosing abstinence, even for brief periods, for the good of their family; (b) few young adults have spent as much time around babies as they ought to have, and so a baby’s needs come as a kind of a shock; (c) far too few women and men really view their sex life together as a gift they give to one another.
About that last bit. There’s a temptation to write that women, and especially men, tend instead to view their sex life together as something they get from each other. But I don’t think that’s it at all, or at least, that would be far too simplistic. Rather, I think that a lot of fairly-newly-wed couples — especially those who get along well, love each other, and have a satisfying sex life — view their sex life together as a really fun hobby that they have in common and that binds them together mainly because they like doing it together, they like having each other as partners in it, so much. Like rock climbing or tennis or mountain biking.
This creates a problem when suddenly one of the parties doesn’t really like it all that much for an extended period. Which happens to a lot of nursing mothers. Libido just disappears, overnight, and it can be gone for months. It’s not necessarily what we would choose, but on the other hand, you can see its utility for baby-spacing.
So if your sex life is a really fun hobby that brings you closer together because you like it so much, and all of a sudden one of you has just up and lost interest, doesn’t like it anymore — well, not only does the other person not get to play or practice, but — he’s lost his partner! It’s like, I do not even know this person anymore. One of the reasons I fell in love with her is that she likes this as much as I do, and she likes doing it with ME. They seem to have lost something they had in common. It can’t bind them anymore because they don’t both like it anymore. At least — it can feel that way, even if intellectually they know better. And wouldn’t you be worried that the change was permanent?
Meanwhile, from the other side of the bed, the sex-life-as-mutual-hobby model could lead to a simple equation of: We do this together because we both like it and feel like doing it; I don’t feel like doing it right now; and both of us are too damn busy to waste time on hobbies anyway. It’s not like I have time to go mountain biking, either. Requests for sex might even seem borderline crazy, like you’re being asked to play tennis when he knows damn well you have a pulled hamstring. And the point is to enjoy it together, right? So if you’re not enjoying it, then you’re not really together, right? Bad sex = bad marriage, ergo, avoid bad sex?
The model of sex-life-as-mutual-gift is a lot less superficially exciting, I admit, but it has traveled really well over the rough spots we’ve encountered. In practical terms, for us, it means we follow two rules of thumb: Don’t say "no thanks" unless you really, really, really feel you can’t go through with sex right now (e.g., due to migraine; influenza; serious need to avoid pregnancy; utter exhaustion); and trust each other to reserve "no thanks" for those situations. Today we are young and healthy and in pretty good spirits, so today it means rarely refuse, never pressure. We will not always be young and healthy. Maybe someday one of us will have to say "no thanks" more than rarely. That’s where the trust will really have to come in.
I guess a corollary is that somewhere between "no thanks" and "YES WHAT A GREAT IDEA" is a vast middle ground, fairly common when there’s a new baby in the house, along the lines of "Okay, if you don’t mind me falling asleep halfway through." A sense of humor helps immensely there, but doesn’t it always?
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