How many of you have wondered how sex after childbirth feels for your partner?
Yes, we’re all pretty certain he’s mostly just grateful to be getting any at all, but that’s not the whole story is it? For while we know we must be gentle with ourselves, with our bodies and with what we should accept we are capable of doing, there is always that niggling little voice – the voice of doubt and fear that says, but what if he doesn’t like it? What if I feel too [insert personal body fear here] for him?
So, in the interest of quenching our collective curiosity, I’ve gone and asked all the most awkward questions for you. And just to make sure I had all bases covered, I asked a man whose amazing partner pushed not one, but two babies from her precious vagine.
Ladies, meet Ian
Ian and Robin* waited about three months before having sex again after the twins. And while it wasn’t exactly a hot and stormy affair, it was something the couple felt they needed, and were ready, to do.
Ian describes the experience as “almost a biological feedback thing,” for Robin. It was a means of testing the boundaries of her body, feeling and assessing what she could and couldn’t do. “It was the kind of feeling where we felt like we needed break the ice again,” he says, “We had to be very weary and she was very tentative. It wasn’t like being back in the time before we had kids having rough, drunken sex for three or four hours – it was the opposite of that. She was still very sore and still very unsure (also, after having twins, the repercussions of having sex were in the front of her mind.) and I wanted to be very careful”
So… what was it like then?
Ok, just to be clear, it wasn’t exactly the sex of the century. But nobody involved expected it to be. Rather there was a caution and gentleness that coloured the experience in its own way.
“I wanted to be very gentle. And I was – even to the point of being quite awkward,” he remembers. “I was just trying to be very conscious of not hurting her (during penetration) and trying to be as soft as possible. There were things that she could and couldn’t do. Breasts were completely out of bounds for example, so I remember trying to think of other erogenous areas that wouldn’t have necessarily been the first place to go to when we’d have sex before. Like around the sides of her breasts, around her ribs, around her lower back and her waist. We didn’t have any oral sex at the time either; just a lot of touching.”
Ian also recalls that while he still felt aroused, the extreme caution made him feel like he was looking at the experience from quite a detached perspective. “There was no real sense of losing yourself in the moment,” he explains. “And because of that, you’re never really able to let go.”
That said, it was funny too. “Look, it was incredibly milky,” Ian reminds me. “There was milk squirting out of both breasts. We were all awkward and tentative and meanwhile there was all this milk flying around. And even though I thought it was a little bit sexual (she didn’t), it was also quite amusing in a way – copping an eyeful of milk while you’re trying to be erotic.”
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The difference down there is not what you think
Ian remembers being quite surprised by how little difference he actually felt when inside Robin. “I thought it would be more expanded, but I remember being quite surprised by the amount of resistance.
“It had changed; the feeling of it had changed in that early part. I don’t think everything went back to normal for up to a year after the twins. The feeling of being inside her, the feeling of her vagina, I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It definitely felt like there’d been some kind of change. And not in a, I just can’t feel anything, or there’s less resistance than there was, way. It just felt a little bit different. It was like the muscles had moved around in there.”
Parting words of wisdom?
Ian knows it’s difficult for men to not be selfish when it comes to their sexual needs, but it’s experiences like this that he believes allow men to really grow.
“If your man can’t get past thinking about their own sexual needs after he’s had a child, then he’s going to be quite unhappy. But if he can learn to put his partner’s needs and his children’s needs into the spectrum, his personal happiness in the future will be much greater.”
“Just don’t judge anything,” he says. “You can’t judge your body or your partner or how you feel or what’s going to happen. You just can’t.”
*Not her real name.
This article was first published on KidSpot and was republished on theAsianparent with permission.