Part 2: Keeping it sexy after kids…
In this week’s installment of “Modern Love,” we will continue our conversation from our last column, answering the following question from a reader: “Dear Maxwell’s, any tips for keeping things hot and heavy after having kids? So many of our friends seem to have lost that spark after having kids. How do we make sure that doesn’t happen to us?”
Before we get into “hot and heavy” territory, we first need to get parents to opt into dealing with actually having a physical intimacy at all. So many parents are living in sexless marriages and buying into common excuses that keep them stuck in this paradigm. In our last article, we spoke about how it's important to contextualize pregnancy and the first year of a baby’s life as a very short, (though it can seem like it goes on forever) “phase” and that it’s okay that intimacy, let alone even time to take a shower or go to the bathroom alone, takes a back seat to the very real demands of early parenthood. After a child turns 1 however, the demands of parenting change. The shock and upheaval of the early newborn phase is for the most part, past and parents can, and need to tend to the garden of their physical, emotional and spiritual intimacy, and generally have at least some time to do so.
The most common roadblock that we see in why parents struggle so much in nurturing their physical intimacy is using children as a scapegoat for having a lackluster sexual and emotional connection. Sure, it’s an easy excuse to use, but it’s not a viable one and it’s majorly responsible for why marriages get relegated to the sexless category. It’s not actually true that just because you are tired at the end of the day because…kids, or emotionally disconnected from your partner because…kids, that you can’t also have a thriving intimacy with your partner.
So right off the bat…stop using your children as an excuse for a lackluster intimacy and start to prioritize your relationship. We recommended a date night once a week to get you started. 1 time per week where you turn your phone off and set aside time just the two of you. This doesn’t have to be sexual. It’s a time for you to both take off the “mommy” and “daddy” hats you have been wearing all week and put on your “husband/wife” or “intimate partner” hats. If you can afford a babysitter once a week, do that. If you can’t, put the kids to bed and then change your outfit into something more date night appropriate and meet in your living room or kitchen and connect as a couple. Treat date night as sacred because it is.
Another common excuse that we hear all the time in our coaching practice is “a lack of emotional connection.” With the craziness of having kids and how busy modern day parents tend to be, yes it’s harder to be emotionally connected than it was when you were footloose and fancy free and had time to gaze into each other's eyes all the time. But people use a lack of emotional connection as a justification to not have sex with their partner all the and we call BS on that. As an example, you don’t need to be emotionally connected to your kids to pick them up from school, or make them lunch or take them to gymnastics or basketball practice. And you would never just opt out of your parenting duties because of a lack of feeling like it or being tired or emotionally disconnected from your children. In the same vein, you don’t need to be emotionally connected with your partner to have sex with them! Stop using this excuse to opt out of your physical intimacy. Also remember, that physical intimacy usually results in more emotional intimacy.
Perhaps the most important context that we can offer parents to get them to uplevel this area of their relationship is that your children can only be as happy as your relationship. Why? Because they grow up inside the ecosystem of your relationship. They are literally learning about love, how to love, what love looks like, through you, in how you relate to each other. So ironically, the quality of your intimacy has a massive impact on your children’s wellbeing. We offer you this context as a final frontier to get your act together. We know all too well as parents ourselves how easy it is to put our own wellbeing aside for the sake of our children. And it’s super easy to sacrifice the wellbeing of our intimate relationship “in service” of the kids. But when you connect the wellbeing of your intimate relationship to the wellbeing of your children…then thats it... you must be happy in your relationship, for the sake of your children. And a happy relationship is a physically intimate one.
