I dreaded my husband’s attempts to initiate sex after pregnancy, but giving in out of a sense of duty or embracing a sexless relationship both felt like self-betrayal

After giving birth to my first child, I wondered: would I ever want sex again?

After giving birth to my first child, I wondered: would I ever want sex again?

It was lunchtime on 13 February, and Dustin and I were about to do our midday baby handoff. I had been working in a coffee shop and he’d spent the morning at the park with the baby; now it was my turn to take over.

The next day would be our first Valentine’s Day together as parents, a fact to which I’d been assigning increasing – and arbitrary – meaning. Would I get it together and write a love letter, bake a cake, make a print of the baby’s feet inside a heart and prove to myself and whoever followed me on Instagram that Dustin and I were still as in love as ever?

On Valentine’s Days past, there’d been pipe cleaner hearts, love notes written with shower crayons bought special for the occasion, junk store postcards tucked into the perfect book (Eileen Myles, Mavis Gallant, Colette). There was the year he hid each individual chocolate from a box in a different place around our small apartment; months later, I’d be looking for a cough drop or a cigarette and laugh out loud when I found one.

If I could pull something like that off, then I’d know things were still the same between us, or would be eventually.

I opened the door and found the two of them at the kitchen table, the baby kicking in the high chair, smearing applesauce everywhere, Dustin reading to him from Paradise Lost. I rolled my eyes but felt a piercing affection for them. My family. I got a washcloth to wipe down the table, then grabbed the baby and slumped down on the couch with him, breathing him in.

If you’d asked me the day before, I would have said that the baby and I were going to spend the afternoon doing some kind of last-minute romance craft, but now that the occasion was upon us, that seemed a little too ambitious. God. What was it like, to do a nice thing for someone that wasn’t obligatory?

I could remember the gestures, even remember how nice they felt, but I could no longer relate to the impulse. As I nursed the baby, I whittled down the plan. Okay, I thought, I’ll get up early with the baby tomorrow and then we’ll … make a cute breakfast. I’ll have him draw on a card.

Dustin’s plan, I was sure of it, started and ended with him having sex with me. Or so I was dreading.

That February and for the entire year or so postpartum – when do you stop being postpartum? Or are you that way forever? – I not only didn’t want to have sex, I would have preferred it not exist.



I knew our whole dynamic was threatening to move from sitcom territory into an actual problem, a problem that could be fixed, or at least de-escalated, by my just getting on with it. Lie back without thinking too much, fake it till you make it, you know the drill.

And I did do it every month or so, after endless internal debate. Sometimes it felt good, too, in the end, but it was preceded by so much anxious hand-wringing it never felt quite worth it. Couldn’t we put sex on the back burner for a while? Revisit when the mood strikes?

The mood was always striking him, never me, and that was the problem. We were going on nine months since the birth and I still felt like punching him when he poked me in the butt with his erection before we fell asleep.

It seemed like we were doomed sex-wise, or I was, which meant we were doomed relationship-wise, which meant we were painstakingly building a life together that wasn’t going to go anywhere ultimately. And how would that even work? It wouldn’t. We’d have to figure it out. Or I would.

I wanted to want to have sex. Does that count for anything? I knew that I’d enjoyed it once.

The first few weeks Dustin and I were together, we had sex like I imagine any new couple does: right when we came in the door, again before bed, and then sometimes in the middle of the night, one of us waking up and reaching over and then, wordlessly, off we went.

The parenting books, at least, were understanding. They said you were tired. That you were worried the baby might start crying as soon as you were, against all odds, about to come.



They said you might be “adjusting to your new body” or actively denying the reality of it. You might be tensing up as you waited for him to touch your C-section scar and the surrounding area, which was, in a way that made you feel short of breath, still numb and might always be. You might feel “touched out”, they said, as if a sentient sack of potatoes were always, somehow, right on top of you.

You might feel, even when the baby was asleep in his crib, like some part of you could not, might never, fully relax again. To lose yourself in the way that good sex required felt dangerous or impossible when you were so inextricably entwined with someone else. Who was not your partner.

I also spent enough time reading baby forums and Facebook mom groups to know that I wasn’t alone. I knew other parents let sex disappear from their lives, telling themselves they were simply too busy or too tired. Some people claimed they didn’t feel bad about it; they just figured they’d get around to fucking each other again eventually.

Other women, under the cloak of anonymity, were more righteous: “I gave him a child. The least he can do is jerk it in the shower and not complain.” I tried reading a post like this out loud to Dustin once, passive-aggressively, but it blew up in my face when he told me it would be “so hot” if I told him to go jerk off.

As much as I resented the pressure, I wasn’t ready to embrace a sexless relationship. Part of me worried that if I gave up on summoning sexual desire now, at this seemingly critical juncture, it would never come back.

What if my body forgot? What if I lost the thread entirely? What if I woke up a few years from now and I was a Diane Keaton character in a turtleneck, screaming because my husband saw me naked? It didn’t seem that far off, honestly.

Another camp seemed to treat sex after kids as a sort of solemn duty. Women who took this approach believed sex to be a vital part of a romantic relationship and tended to be horrified by anyone who neglected it. All it took was a few minutes of obligation, of joyless effort, to keep him pleased, they argued.

Maybe an obligatory handjob every couple of nights could have kept us connected. But something about that never sat quite right with me. Wasn’t it hard enough, as a woman, to remember your own desire?

I imagined myself faking orgasms, dissociating from my body, ignoring what I actually wanted for so long that I’d no longer be able to remember wanting to have sex for its own sake.

Either approach seemed like a betrayal of self at a time when I didn’t have much self to spare. I said no to sex because it was something I could still say no to, because how I felt was so new and complex, I needed to figure it out. I knew that if I didn’t, I would start layering obfuscations over it until I couldn’t go back.

So I claimed my body for myself whenever I could. I guarded against all comers, even if the intruder was the man I lived with, a man who loved me in all my complexity. I was all he wanted, he told me. And I just couldn’t give myself to him.

Things came to a head that afternoon when Dustin took me shopping for a Valentine’s gift. I want to say I laughed when he pulled the car up outside our local progressive sex toy shop, one of those ‘Isn’t that rich?’ laughs, but in fact I viscerally recoiled, then nodded, quietly accepting my fate.



After a few minutes of Dustin wagging vibrators under my nose like they were smelling salts, with the baby strapped to his chest, I walked out.

“What’s going on,” Dustin said sharply, when he caught up to me on the street.



“Sorry,” I blurted. “But being in there … it’s like you’re rubbing it in my face.”

“Rubbing what in your face?”

“Uh, the fact that I have no sex drive? That breastfeeding has dried me up, left me with nothing? That I don’t even recognize my body anymore, and it’s terrifying, and you have no idea what it’s like? And instead of asking me how I am, you just bug me and pout about how you’re not getting laid. How would you feel if you lost your sex drive?”

Dustin looked at me, confused.

“I didn’t know you didn’t have a sex drive. You didn’t tell me that.” He was choked up, almost whispering. Stricken.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or yell. What? I thought I was telling him every time I rolled away from him in bed, every time I flinched when he reached out to me, when he slipped his hand down my pants or up my shirt.

“It’s a thing that happens to a lot of people, you know! It’s totally normal, but no one tells you!” I was like a lawyer building her case.

“I didn’t know!” he said. Both of us were incredulous.

“Well, then, what did you think was going on?” I said.

“I dunno, I just thought you didn’t want me.”

“What?” I said. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, seeing the past nine months of our life tick by as if in a movie montage, moments where I thought he knew what I was thinking.

Wouldn’t he have noticed if he weren’t so stuck in his own fuckless story? Shouldn’t he have known? Apparently not.

“So you really didn’t know?”

He shrugged, clearly hurt. “You never told me.” Throughout this conversation, he was bouncing the baby.

I wanted to lie down right there, in front of the Japanese stationery shop, and never get up. Why had I never told him? When did life get so delicate, I wondered – both too tenuous and too cherished – for me to say certain things out loud? The stakes were higher, the thoughts were darker, and our relationship was weaker than it had ever been.

Dustin still felt familiar but not quite safe enough to confide in, like he was too invested in my feelings for me to be honest with him. When all your thoughts are shitty and even you don’t trust them, why communicate them to the person you are supposed to love the most?

Or so went the argument in my head. My feelings felt dangerous. Potentially destructive. I’d spent almost a year waiting for him to understand, to grant me a dispensation, to recognize that our dry spell was just one part of a bigger, scarier paradigm shift.

I wanted him to see that I was scared, too, that we wanted the same thing, real intimacy. But first I wanted him to leave me alone. I didn’t want to have to tell him.

Maybe I had been too ashamed to say anything. I tried to imagine a parallel universe, one that was kinder and more forgiving. One where I was kinder and more forgiving. Where a dry spell after kids was seen not as some moral failure, a reproductive bait-and-switch for men to groan and joke darkly about, as if we women had trapped our partners and now had no more use for them. A universe where I wasn’t paralyzed, afraid to face what I had interpreted as “a bad sign”, a failure (mine) of imagination or nerve. A failure to connect.

But I hadn’t told him anything. I’d just turned my back to him in bed.

If only I could have seen into the future then, by some act of grace, and known for sure that things would be okay. I could have sat Dustin down and told him to wait for me on the other side. Let’s let the dust settle and accept that I’m a nursing mammal and everything’s in flux and we’re scared but know that in a year or so, everything will be different.

One day the baby will nap for three hours every day and on the weekend, after we both go to our respective corners and stare at our phones long enough to regain a sense of equilibrium, one of us – okay, it’ll still be you – you will creep down to whatever room I’m in and I’ll be happy to see you.

Know that I won’t jump at your touch, that I won’t turn my back to you, that eventually I will feel an almost adolescent reawakening of desire, that of course it’s always you I wanted, and want, that logistics and baggage and pressure and getting too into my own head will always be part of the equation, but someday, thank Jesus, I’ll be genuinely horny again.

In a week or a month from this 13 February, we’ll find ourselves in bed in the middle of the day, and after another botched attempt at sex, I’ll confess to him about the birth flashbacks I get sometimes when I’m on my back, pinned down.

We’ll cry together in bed and it’ll be the beginning of the end of my avoiding him and avoiding difficult conversations. I’ll know that as long as we can talk to each other, we aren’t doomed. But we have to do it on purpose. We have to try now. Ugh.

The next morning, our first Valentine’s Day as parents, I fried Dustin an egg in the shape of a heart and wrote “We love you” in hot sauce around the edge of the plate. When Dustin came down the stairs a few minutes later, I looked at him and felt, if not love, then an echo of it.

Enough to know it was still there somewhere and would eventually find its way back up to the surface.