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• Tuesday, January 31, 2006 05:29 AM

  Bigger Picture Isn't Just About Sex

  Ann wrote:

  "Birthing a baby is a miserably painful process and many of us are left with a crotch full of stitches. Many are still bleeding at six weeks. Comparing it to penile injury is more accurate than comparing it to stress. I think most men would want their wives to wait until the stitches came out and the bleeding stopped, and until getting an erection didn't pull painfully at the scar."

  I think we've gotten to hung up on sex -- though that was the point of this particular article.

  First, I agree with you that waiting a few months isn't unresonable and is, in fact, quite necessary both from a medical point of view as well as a psychological one. Birth is painful and difficult.

  The problem we keep running into in this discussion is that when I make the point that sometimes women (or men) never recover and these sexal changes and they persist for years -- I'm not getting any responses from women saying, "Yes, that sometimes happens and is a significant problem in a marriage."

  What I'm reading is people either unintentionaly or (as I suspect) purposefully mis-reading the posts and saying that men are being unresonable for demanding that their sex lives return to normal with weeks -no!-day of a women giving birth. No one was saying that. I'm also reading posts from people again saying men are being unresonable for demanding their wives dres like hookers days after giving birth! No one said that either -- changes in grooming and dress were merely brought up as an example of some of the total changes that can occur in couples after they give birth -- and that sometimes these changes in grooming and appereance can be extreme from the point of view of the spouse be they male or female.

  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.

  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?

  —Anonymous
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