I was reading CNN this morning and there was a story about how much your sex life can change post-new baby. I have to say I was more than a little relieved at seeing that I'm not the only one that has absolutely no overt desire to have sex. Yes, I masturbate, mainly because it is easier and faster than actually having sex with my husband. But it isn't done out of any overwhelming desire to be sexual or sexually expressive.The thought of having sex with anyone, including my husband, is about as unappealing to me as the thought of cleaning a toilet. It's time consuming, physically difficult, for the most part painful and I'll just end up having to do it again in a week. Plus, it smells.
I have many thoughts and feelings about exactly why my sex drive has taken a nose dive in the months (years) since my daughter was born, and in all reality since she was conceived. There's the obvious self esteem issue tied in with my own body image and lack of post-labor/delivery weight loss. But there's more to it than that, some of which was shown forth in all its psychobabble glory thanks to the aforementioned CNN article I was reading. Having a baby can be akin to having an affair. All the emotional intimacy you'd normally focus on your partner is now being sent in a wholly different direction and resulting in the 100% baby exclusivity.
But I think for me personally, it's more than that. Before my husband and I got pregnant, I had an affair. Met someone online, met in person, had sex, became very emotionally invested, and then had the rug pulled abruptly out from under the relationship when my husband discovered my infidelity by surreptitiously hacking my email. Not my finest moment. Up to the point when I actually became involved with this other person, I would not in a million years have ever thought I would cheat on my husband. He had cheated on me 2 years earlier with the mother of his 2 other kids and it had devastated me. I was about as anti-affair as you could get. I wouldn't watch any of Brad Pitt's movies for the longest time because I took his betrayal of Jennifer on a very personal level. That's how against infidelity I was.
Then I met this person. This person who was 10 years my junior and the absolute dream of anybody in my position. Gorgeous, well built, groomed, smelled amazing and was totally into me. Even AFTER seeing me up close, still wanted to have sex with me. As for me, 2 years out of gastric bypass, I had lost about 160 or so pounds and was for the first time in my life feeling good about myself. I felt sexy. I felt confident. This person's continued interest in me only served to bolster those feelings. So I went down paths that I never would have in a million years imagined myself going down. And it bit me squarely on the ass.
8 months later, we found out I was pregnant. It had been an incredibly difficult and trying 8 months between my affair and the introduction of a pregnancy into our lives. The sudden addition of a baby into the equation effectively put our road to marital recovery on hold and I don't think we've fully gotten back on that road yet.
The thought of having sex right now not only physically exhausts me, it also repulses me and fills me with intense anxiety and monumental guilt. I have not yet fully integrated my own feelings about what I did to myself and to my husband nor have I fully moved past what I did or who I did it with. I still think about this other person on an almost daily basis and struggle with the guild surrounding that as well. It's not fair to my husband, or to myself or to my marriage. It doesn't help things any that in addition to the libido standstill, we appear to be in a communications breakdown as well. My husband has only been overtly amorous toward me once in months and it was so aggressive that I immediately shut down, closed off and my skin literally started to crawl. And it wasn't in response to HIM but just to the situation in general. Hopefully sending him the link to this ebook I found will clue him in on some of the baby related issues that are creeping up and put him on the right track to slowly reintroducing sex back into our relationship.
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