Guest blog: How our sex life changed when we became parents

Image by the brilliant Stuart F Taylor

This week’s guest blogger is a return visitor – he came by in 2015 to write about having sex to conceive, then popped back a few months later to give a lovely update. Now that they’ve got a toddler to look after, how has their sex life changed? What are the challenges of parenthood when it comes to intimacy? Please welcome back this guest blogger as he talks about shagging as parents…

How our sex life changed when we became parents

“You fuck me too well”

“I beg your pardon?”

That might sound like a humble brag but it really isn’t. It was in effect a plea for change which I hadn’t picked up on. Of course things had changed….. we have a 3 year old now.

Conception, as detailed previously, had been a mixed affair. It all started with enthusiasm and gusto but dragged on to the point of frustration. Sex became a chore and though we put a brave face on, the freedom not to have sex was sorely missed. The time in between fucks is important. A constant stream of anything gets dull after too long and sex had become something of a banality.

Of course things changed again once we had a baby. Neither of us wanted sex for a while, we were too engrossed in being mummy and daddy. Sure, parenthood brings you closer as a couple, but it’s helpful supportive love you are after rather than degenerate dick love.

It’s about 9 months in when things get hard and start to twitch again. Our little boy was sleeping through, now in his own room, and we found we had a little more time, space and energy to spend with, on, and in each other. We were well used to being tired by now and everyone else had become used to us looking tired, so we indulged ourselves with long and intense sessions deep into the night. I learnt to keep going until she was thoroughly fucked, limp and helpless, and whilst she became physically spent she found she could climax indefinitely. Providing I could resist my first urge to orgasm I could keep going and going, make her come, keep going, make her come again then keep going and make her come more.

We had a child to look after the next day, it’s ironic that the intensity of looking after something you both created causes this sort of intimacy. The perverse waste of energy just when you need it most is exactly the same sort of logic Donald Trump uses when he gives the oil industry the reach around: it’s not sustainable.

A few months later things slow down. The baby becomes a toddler and that’s when the real fun begins. At 1 year old any extra energy you might have is spent following them round all day making sure they don’t climb too high, fall on their face or pull the wrong bit of the cat. Fast forward to 3 years old and you are pretty much spending your life making sure they don’t bankrupt you, because left unchecked it’s not just their clumsiness/curiosity you’re policing but now it’s their devilish amusement. As they grow up, so must you.

We’d have liked to carry on enjoying what we enjoyed but it was just too demanding, so it simply didn’t happen very often. It seems so simple now, “not tonight, I’m too tired” is a legitimate excuse when the sex is actually physically exhausting but for too long neither of us had the inclination to say what we needed, that we had to change the sex we had to fit in with our lifestyle.

We finally resolved to have ‘worse’ sex.

I say ‘worse’ only because that’s how it felt at the time. We needed to be quicker, come less and save a bit of energy for the following morning. How was that going to work? Proactively looking at your lifestyle and figuring out what would work best is a bizarre way to satisfy your impulses, but at the same time it’s either that or not have anything satisfied at all. We were not really keen to change what we knew got us off, but such was it’s infrequency a calculated change was needed.

I suspect it sounds just about the least spontaneous, amorous and intimate thing you can imagine but the result is we are having more sex now than at any time since the birth, and all it required was some really honest communication. We have agreed to have un-aspirational sex, stripped back to basics, environmentally friendly sex to torture the analogy. Not as a permanent solution, but as a basis to build on. Developing a new sex life that evolves with our new circumstances rather than relying on old tricks and established routines.

From that perspective it feels fresher than anything we have tried before.

5 Comments

  • CG says:

    Good for you to write about this reality of life. The trouble for many is that this lull in sexual activity does not match up with a balanced lull in sexual appetites. Many couples get into a blame/dissatisfaction cycle than can eventually kill the marriage. In reality what is needed most is understanding (and as you said communication doesn’t hurt) and allowing the other person to find non-destructive outlets for those nights the other is too tired. Eventually two things happen….the appetites revive and the expectations/demands diminish and balance and appreciation can be restored. (This is hard thing to believe when you’re in 20’s-40’s which happens to be time you need to believe it the most.)

  • Phillip says:

    “Some really honest communication”. Time to try this ‘unique’ idea. Thanks! Actually I have been thinking on it and also an effort to recover my soul which just didn’t like getting up in the morning. Time for a new start.

    Phillip

  • smersh says:

    This was wonderful! Thanks you.

  • Frankie says:

    Wow – good for you. To be honest, I’m utterly jealous. I’m a father of a two year old, and my wife has zero libido whatsoever. Hopefully we’ll get there eventually!

  • May More says:

    Love real life posts like this – it is not easy being a lover and a parent – I found the combination really difficult – thanks for sharing your journey

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