Sex after parenthood is rarely just about sex. When parents feel exhausted, overwhelmed, resentful, or disconnected from themselves, desire often fades too. This article explores how parenthood changes intimacy, why low desire can be a valuable message, and how reconnecting with yourself can help you reconnect with your partner.
Sex After Having Children – What Parenthood Does To Intimacy
Sex after having children can become… complicated.
Before kids came along, sex might have felt spontaneous, easy, playful, reassuring, or just part of the rhythm of your relationship.
After children, it can sometimes start to feel loaded.
It can become another thing to think about, or another thing you feel you’re not doing enough. For many parents it becomes another area where you feel some combination of guilty, rejected, resentful, lonely, or misunderstood.
And because sex is so intimate, it can become the place where everything else you’re feeling has the biggest impact.
The tiredness, the resentment, the emotional load. The lack of time alone. The feeling that your body doesn’t quite belong to you in the same way any more. The sadness of wondering where the two of you went.
So sex after kids is definitely not just about sex.
It’s often about how much you feel like yourself – the person who had opinions, interests, desires, plans, energy, and curiosity. About how much you feel wanted. And about whether you still feel free enough, safe enough, and relaxed enough to let your partner come close.
You can love your partner and still not feel desire
You can love your partner deeply and still not feel particularly sexual towards them – especially if you’re in a phase of life where you feel needed all the time.
If you’ve spent the day being climbed on, asked for snacks, managing everyone’s emotions, remembering the school email, sorting the washing, planning dinner, noticing what needs doing, and trying to keep some tiny part of yourself intact… it makes sense if your body doesn’t instantly switch into lover mode at bedtime.
It can be difficult, once we become parents, to move from Mum or Dad to lover.
And for many mothers in particular, sex can start to feel like another demand on a body and nervous system that are already overstretched.
That doesn’t mean you don’t love your partner, it doesn’t mean your relationship is doomed, and it doesn’t mean you’ll never want sex again.
But it probably does mean there’s something going on that’s worth paying attention to.
Low desire is often a message
When desire declines or disappears, it might be trying to tell us something.
Sometimes it fades because you’re exhausted, touched out, or don’t feel good in your body.
Sometimes it’s because you feel emotionally disconnected, especially if you’ve been feeling resentful about how much seems to fall to you.
Often it’s because you’ve become so focused on caring for everyone else that you’ve lost touch with yourself – and it’s difficult to access desire when you’ve lost access to your own wants, needs, feelings, and dreams.
Sometimes it isn’t really that you don’t want sex – it’s that you don’t want the kind of sex that feels like one more thing to you provide for someone else.
It’s that you want to feel close, relaxed, and wanted – not needed.
You want to feel like a woman – not just a mother, organiser, problem-solver, or emotional support system, but alive, playful, attractive, interesting, and free.
So rather than asking, “How do we have more sex?” it can be much more useful to ask:
What would need to change for closeness to feel possible again?
Your sex life after having children often reflects the atmosphere between you
When individuals or couples come to me struggling with sex after kids, the conversation is rarely just about sex.
It’s usually about the whole emotional climate of the relationship.
How much do you feel like a team?
How often do you feel appreciated?
Can ask for what you need without it feeling tense?
How much do you feel like your partner sees what you’re carrying?
Do you feel able to say no without guilt?
Do you feel able to say yes without pressure?
Are there still moments of affection, humour, warmth, and ordinary everyday kindness?
Because physical intimacy rarely thrives in an atmosphere of criticism, defensiveness, scorekeeping, or resentment.
It grows much more naturally where there’s emotional safety, generosity, honesty, and enough space for both people to feel like themselves.
And most women don’t actually come to me because they want more sex.
They come because they want to feel more like themselves: more confident, honest, relaxed, and able to enjoy the life they’ve worked so hard to build.
Sex is often just one of the places where they notice how much they’ve drifted away from that version of themselves.
You don’t need to force desire
The last thing couples need is to feel more pressure around sex – because pressure tends to make desire retreat even further.
What most couples need is a way back to each other where neither of them feels blamed.
That might mean talking more honestly about what sex has come to represent in your relationship.
Rebuilding affection without expecting it to lead anywhere.
Addressing any resentment that has built up between you.
Making practical changes so one person isn’t carrying so much.
And it might mean reconnecting with your own body, pleasure, confidence, and desires, before you try to reconnect sexually with your partner.
Because when you’ve lost touch with yourself, it’s hard to feel genuinely available to someone else.
Back in the Sack will support you to get clarity about what you need from your partner both inside and outside the bedroom, so you can rebuild connection from there.
Maybe sex is one way we remember who we are
Sex can be very good for us.
Good sex can calm the nervous system, bring us back into our bodies, release stress, and help us feel close.
It can remind us that we are more than the logistics and packed lunches and bedtime routines.
It can remind us of who we were in the beginning.
And maybe that’s one of the things sex is for.
Not as a performance, an obligation, or an attempt to prove that everything is fine…
But as a way of saying: we’re still here. Underneath all this change, we’re still “us”.
Sex after having children – finding your way back
If sex has become difficult since having children, try not to panic or blame yourself or your partner.
It helps more to get curious instead.
What has changed between you?
What has changed within you?
How have you been feeling? Are you exhausted, resentful, lonely, overwhelmed, or disconnected?
What do you need more of?
What do you need less of?
And what would help you reconnect with yourself again?
Because the way back to sex often isn’t through trying harder to have sex.
It’s through rebuilding the conditions which cultivate closeness: honesty, warmth, equality, pleasure, and room for you both to be whole people, not just parents.
For most women, the goal isn’t simply to have more sex – it’s to become the version of you who knows what she wants, can receive as well as give, and feels fully present in her life.
The version who feels connected to herself, and therefore capable of deeper connection with everyone else.
Back In The Sack is for you if you want support with both emotional and physical intimacy after having children.
Want support with this?
If you’ve been feeling tense, disconnected, or resentful in your relationship since having children, you’re not alone – and you don’t have to wait for your partner to change before something can shift.
Love Happy Live Free is my coaching programme for mothers who want to understand the patterns underneath resentment and disconnection, communicate more clearly about what matters, and create a relationship that feels calmer, closer, fairer, and more like a team again.
You can do the work on your own, even if your partner isn’t ready.
Click here to get in touch, and click here to join my mailing list for regular updates on how to have a great relationship after kids.