After a day spent feeding, changing, swaddling, and then feeding, changing and swaddling some more, the first thing you want to do when your partner gets home is slip into something sexy and go all Fifty Shades of Grey on each other, right? Probably not.
Chances are you dreamed of having a family for a long time, but now your post-baby sex life may be less than scandalous. That’s to be expected, says Kristen Chase, a sex columnist for motherhooduncensored.net and author of The Mominatrix’s Guide to Sex: A No-Surrender Advice Book for Naughty Moms. “After being enraptured with pregnancy for nine months, there’s this little person in your life whose needs come before anyone else’s, and your relationship can fall to the bottom of the priority list,” she says.
A New Kind of Threesome
That sweet, cooing, smiling, laughing baby that now occupies all your waking hours and thoughts might be the best thing that’s ever happened to you and your partner, but you might already be struggling to reconnect as a couple after baby is added to the equation: 73 percent of respondents said they have less sex now than before they had kids. “After the first child, many people feel like they’ve lost interest in sex and don’t feel like themselves anymore,” says Irwin Goldstein Ph.D., director of the Institute for Sexual Medicine in San Diego. Your new love has left you tired and unmotivated. “It’s very hard to be part of a threesome; all the rules of the game change,” says Dana Dorfman, psychotherapist and parenting expert in New York City. “At its core, both you and your partner are falling in love with someone else—your baby. It’s like you’re both having an affair with the same person, and because of it, your sexual connection can falter.”
