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Read other letters about this article
"Sometimes men who watch the birth have a psychological issue and just can't see their wives as sexual creatures anymore. Watching the birth tmuatizes them. And they don't want to have sex with their wives for YEARS afterward (if ever). This is a serious issue in the marriage and I can't help but believe it does both parities a disservice when posters a) dismiss all these concerns as totally insignificant or b) admit they exist but consider it so rare an occurance as to be unworthy of discussion."
Not insignificant. Inevitable, and one of many different kinds of changes a couple will go through. I guess what interests me more is the process by which people cope. Trauma, regardless of its nature, has patterns to it and recovery has patterns to it, and it becomes a lot more complex within a marriage, where there are two people involved rather than just one. Those patterns interest me a lot more than the details to which they're applied. Trauma destroys, but it also leaves space to rebuild, something it took me a very long time to realize. As I've grow up, I'm come to be grateful for some unexpected things.
What also interests--well, okay, frankly stuns me--is what I see as an assumption that life should be easy and people should never change. Women lose their looks. So do men. People also lose physical health, jobs and family members. They gain things with time, too, things that can make them more attractive than callow youth. I spent part of Saturday night watching a couple in their 70s dance, and they were a lot better at it than some of the younger pairs, even though they were a lot less attractive. There's something to be said for that kind of thing, and you don't get there without taking a few hits. I guess what I've seen behind some of the arguments is the idea that life is never supposed to hurt and that we are entitled to get whatever we want. Of course we don't and it's going to hurt. It never stops hurting. There is no protection from that and we have to learn to deal with it. The problem is that we don't. We snort in disgust at this person who has disappointed us, and we walk away. That is a far bigger problem, I think, that whatever specific changes people go through following the birth of a baby. I think it's also what underlies the suggestions along the lines that women get the increase in prolactin "fixed". After all, nobody is ever supposed to hurt, right? Or have to ask hard questions about what they're doing and why.
So do people undergo radical changes after the birth of a baby? Yes. Are they trivial? No. Are they permanent? Sometimes. But they don't matter to me nearly as much as how they're dealt with, and I don't think that trying to make them go away is the same thing is dealing with them because the process by which they can be dealt with applies to a lot of other things.
"Also, while the point of this particular article dealt with sex -- I think the more interesting article would have been the one that talks about the totality of lifestyle changes that occur in both men and women after child birth.
Wouldn't it have been more interesting to read about the total lifestyle changes (the stresses, the surprises or the unexpected joys or unexpected problems) that occured after having a kid?"
Well, I happen to think that sex is interesting, not to mention an important part of life. Somebody successfully navigating that post-partum change is interesting, too, especially in light of the fact that post-baby sex is generally thought of as worse. And yes, for a while it was non-existant, and then it was different, but in some ways it was better. Different isn't always bad. The process by which this was reached applies to many other things, and it involved turning some assumptions on their heads, assumptions about what sex is for and what constitutes good sex. It's a hard process, but worth going through regardless of the issue.
Other people have written about the lifestyle changes. There are whole books about them. Other people have written about the sexual changes, too, but as with the lifestyle pieces, the articles tend to get buried in the "Life" section. Salon headlined this one and lost subscribers as a result, so it's not difficult to see why.
