With everyday routines, with marital demands and with parenting schedules, it’s difficult to keep alive making love in your life as a couple now. The coming of a baby between you two, in literal sense, can not only alter your psychological affairs but also your intimate stories. Women especially get into a deeper bonding with the child, looking after him/her round-the-clock that her visceral love for the new relationship overpowers her need for other instincts. And it could either be difficult for men to adjust to this fact or the father is equally absorbed in the new role to think about their private life.
A couple of years post kids, you are a fortunate man if you still have a small corner on the bed for yourself. By ‘for yourself’, I mean a space into which no other little feet or bums can intrude until you wake up in the morning. If you co-sleep with your kids, you will know how hard it is to grab a decent space to sleep. One child is still better; more than one can be a nightmare every other night. One of our funniest talks with the mommy friends group is often about how the fathers are chased here and there, from this room to the other and from one corner to the other clinging in search of a sleeping place.
How can your relationship sustain making love when the rules of the game change with threesome now? What once was your bedroom is a family room now. Perhaps, with an infant, some intimacy can still exist because even if a half-asleep baby woke up from the crib, you can be confident that he/she can possibly not make out what the mom and dad are up to. However, with kids getting older, there could always be the alarm factor of what if you get caught half naked by your toddler one night. Privacy – is one of those big little things life grabs from you at this point in your relationship. From casual conversation to sex, you need to have a watch if the third one in the family is listening. And there slowly declines the acquaintance you once had with your spouse!
Sometimes, exhaustion could spell even greater than breach in privacy. You both may have to take turns to work, to keep home sane and care for the baby well. At the end of the day, you are tired enough to think anything else but sleep. And you wish you can wake up without snoozing the alarm or atleast without having to get startled with the baby’s cry. Energy – isn’t as free around both of you as it was earlier. If physical tiredness was one thing to camouflage your libido, mental exhaustion is no less.
Time – yet another villian for your love life now! Date nights aren’t much common in India. Whatever the couple does after the kids would always involve the kids. Said that, you probably get any lone time together. And if at all you get that little time, you hurriedly grab it to discuss more of mundane stuff like paying the bills or planning the grocery shopping before it skips from your mind. Your bonding isn’t tuned now to hum a romantic tune or say I love you or confess your inner boredom. There used to be a time when H and I exchanged excel sheets and whatsapp conversations more than real speaking and listening. It was no more than existing in the same house.
Yet another lost aspect at this juncture in the relationship could be one or both being out of proportions. For the new mother, it is certainly a thing of a killer feeling. What she has adored about her beautiful self all through the years is now gone for a toss. Big tummy, stretch marks and drooping breasts can eat a small corner of her mind during her new mommy days. It’s not about whether she’s attractive to her husband or not. He has witnessed her blown belly and the awkward postures during labour and there isn’t anything to hide or feel shy now. But being attractive to her own self is a bitty prod for a woman to make the love-making moves with her husband. Losing that can pull her back from him in unknown ways.
Even if time, privacy and energy are in favour, something that can hack the intimacy between you two is resentment. The very fact that the communication lines between you both did not get its due importance, can slowly begin to pile up misunderstandings, assumptions and bitterness in the relationship. When this happens, the wife expresses her silent outrage with prohibitions over matters of what the husband desires, because for a woman making love is more of a poignant connection than an impulsive behaviour.
There shall definitely be a day at this phase when you suddenly get shaken up by the fact that it has been a few weeks or a few months since even your fingers touched. And sometimes, this realization can propel in a fierce, spiritless togetherness which I would say is all the more unfruitful for your relationship. It is like finding replacement in emotionless bonding for the gap which now you experience in your love life. This is a point where many husband-wife relationships begin to drift apart. What gets lost is actually not sex, but making love!
Image Credit – Dreamstime
very interesting story narration