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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Men's bodies change too, from the potbelly to balding spots. Also, as quiet as it's kept, many men lose a lot of their...virility as they age. That's just life, that's just part of a longterm relationship.
There are plenty of hot 40something moms out there, there are frumps too. Same goes for the men. Neither party should just let themselves go. Sexual attraction can continue after children.
That's an understandable sentiment -- for a 12-year-old. Parents are expected to be a little more mature.
Actually, life changes for everyone, babies or no babies. Things never stay the same.
Yes, I agree that it's long past time we had an honest dialogue about the physical and emotional consequences of childbearing, because expecting women to look and behave the same before and after is completely unrealistic. I know that celebrity moms do, but they have personal trainers, dieticians, plastic surgeons and full-time nannies.
The rest of us are left to muddle through with what we have, and we are rarely prepared for it. Nor are our husbands. Years of idealized, televised visions of motherhood clash violently with reality, which is in fact a changed body and a changed set of priorities. Both have to change if the baby is going to survive, because human children are born while they're still essentially embryos. It takes a lot of work to care for an embryo. A new baby is not an idle amusement or a plaything, nor is a growing child. Seismic shifts in the relationship should be expected when partners becomes parents.
We also tend to think of women as objects of physical beauty whose primary purpose is to provide sexual gratification. This is fundamentally warped. We are not window dressing for our vaginas. Men who marry for beauty tend to be less content in their marriages, as Neil Chethik discovered. Something to keep firmly in mind when choosing a wife.
We also have a distorted notion of marriage itself. It's as if we assume that we are entitled to a person who will gratify our every need for the rest of our lives. I can't imagine anything less realistic. The notion of a happy marriage as one in which nothing has ever gone wrong is even more warped.
Is any of this easy? No. But when did we get the idea that life was supposed to be easy? I know I sound like my grandmother, but jeeze!
Isn't that perhaps what's really important here, but has only been "suggested" by a few posters? I.e., that men whose wives have recently given birth aren't "getting any?" And, depending on what her pregnancy was like, may not have been getting any for some time?
The comments about prolactin were especially interesting... too much makes a woman less libidinous, but, of course it's absolutely needed for breastfeeding which, by the way, does have some effect on eventually helping a woman to lose the extra weight. The extra weight that a woman gains beyond the pregnancy, just so she can breastfeed. Too bad that more women (who want to breastfeed) don't get more support for a longer period of time. Both moms and babies would likely benefit. Dads would eventually, but not as soon as some of them would like.
I suppose taking something to counter-act the prolactin is a choice-- perhaps even that same drug they used to give women to dry up their milk...
So, I began to wonder, now, when it makes absolutely no difference in my own life (already being a grandmother), if perhaps there is something (evolution, not ID!) that makes it in Nature's best interest for women to have less interest in sex for some time after giving birth. Perhaps that was the "real" birth control effect that has been attributed-- with only limited success-- to breastfeeding. Surely, a woman's lack of desire is one obstacle, though not necessarily an effective one, between a man's sperm and his wife's eggs.
If so, it's often just the beginning, for many women, of feeling torn between their husband's needs and their children's. (I can hear the uproar now!) Yes, it's true. Many women do feel that. The rest of you can argue about why. (However, my first husband did not want me to breastfeed because he was afraid it would ruin my figure and leave my breasts hanging down to my waist. Didn't happen. And I don't look like a grandmother, but it wasn't the only time he obsessed about my weight. Ironically, he was more likely to gain weight than I was, except for the pregnancy.)
Still, one or two female letter writers did hint at the dilemman: If I don't (want to) have sex with him, will he be unfaithful, or worse, will he leave me? One of the male letter writers was more explicit in saying that women must expect some "consequences" for not keeping themselves up, and for not meeting their husband's needs in a "mutually acceptable" way. (What does that really mean?)
Well, perhaps Nature, without the convenient methods of birth control available to us (for now), found other ways to keep a woman's focus on her children, at the expense of a man's attention. Would the child of a woman (in ancient times, I'm saying), who was raring to go again shortly after giving birth, have been as likely to survive if her attention was focused more on having sex than on her child? (Of course, we mustn't bring up that our own rate of infant mortality is so high.)
When I was in my 20's and even in my 30's, I took my body for granted, and I could get away with it because I had my daughter early. By 40, though, one begins to feel the changes, and gradually, one can no longer ignore them. By 50, I was just glad to have survived the challenges of my 40's. I can only imagine that having a child in one's thirties would push one set of dramatic changes up against the next set. And, frankly, those changes come more at a woman's expense than a man's, whatever his needs. Still, I am happy for the children who get to have real adults for parents. Those of us who have our children at younger ages often make more mistakes.
This discussion has given me a new perspective on the advantages for a younger woman in marrying an older man. By the time they get around to having children, he may have slowed down enough to be more patient with her, or even more likely, to be as enamored with parenthood as she is, like most of the older fathers I've seen.
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