When you first begin trying to conceive the sex is great. All of a sudden your sex life now has a purpose past pleasure. It can be liberating. It can be exciting. It lasts all of six months.
Once you hit that magic 6 month mark, sex becomes mechanical. It has a sole driving purpose - baby making. You do it because you have to, because you are fertile, not because you want or desire your partner. Then you become pregnant.
Sex is in a whole new light again. It's life-affirming. It's the cause of the miracle growing inside of you. That is, if you are feeling up to it with the array of new symptoms. Then you finally hit the 2nd or 3rd trimester and start feeling great, but aren't comfortable with your body cause you put on all that weight. Then you deliver.
After 6 weeks of being told no sex, it becomes almost unbearable. You miss the sex like nothing else you have ever experiences, that is if you're getting enough sleep with the new baby and probably lost some of the weight.
Then there are people like me, who get pregnant and don't make it to the 2nd trimester. With the first miscarriage we had sex constantly right afterwards. Perhaps because we were newlyweds. Perhaps it was just a way to connect and grieve with each other. No matter the reason, it helped us get pregnant again in a relatively short period of time.
Something different happened during that last pregnancy and miscarriage. I stopped wanting sex all together. First because it was the fear of miscarriage. Then after the miscarriage I only felt the need to have sex when I was fertile. It's like I automatically got to the 6 month mark and forgot to inform my husband. I'm of course still there and these last 3 months have been hell on him. But apparently what we are both feeling is normal.
Men like to solve problems. I'm not pregnant. In my husbands mind having sex all the time will eventually solve my problem. I on the otherhand have been on such an emotional journey these past 16 months that I have no sex drive whatsoever and am only willing to do it when I do actually have a chance to conceive from it, about 6 - 10 days a month.
Baffled, my husband feels the need to tell me about the other women I knows pregnancies, in the bizarre effort to make me want sex. That only makes me not want it more. As I have mentioned previously, hearing about them is depressing, which is not conducive to upping my sex drive. He want to know how I expect to become pregnant if I don't have sex. Easy I tell him, those few days right before and during ovulation are more that enough sex for me to get pregnant. When I don't become pregnant, we try again. In his mind I'm sure he blames me thinking if only we had more sex, but I know that it doesn't matter. You only have a 1 in 5 chance of conceiving in any given month. It'll happen.
But the real problem isn't that fertility problems are killing our sex life. They're killing our intimacy. We are snippy at each other, especially when sex is concerned. It's a phase that'll pass. When I test positive all of a sudden it will all be worth it. But until then we are trapped each in our own mindset regarding our sex life.
When you first begin trying to conceive the sex is great. All of a sudden your sex life now has a purpose past pleasure. It can be liberating. It can be exciting. It lasts all of six months.
Once you hit that magic 6 month mark, sex becomes mechanical. It has a sole driving purpose - baby making. You do it because you have to, because you are fertile, not because you want or desire your partner. Then you become pregnant.
Sex is in a whole new light again. It's life-affirming. It's the cause of the miracle growing inside of you. That is, if you are feeling up to it with the array of new symptoms. Then you finally hit the 2nd or 3rd trimester and start feeling great, but aren't comfortable with your body cause you put on all that weight. Then you deliver.
After 6 weeks of being told no sex, it becomes almost unbearable. You miss the sex like nothing else you have ever experiences, that is if you're getting enough sleep with the new baby and probably lost some of the weight.
Then there are people like me, who get pregnant and don't make it to the 2nd trimester. With the first miscarriage we had sex constantly right afterwards. Perhaps because we were newlyweds. Perhaps it was just a way to connect and grieve with each other. No matter the reason, it helped us get pregnant again in a relatively short period of time.
Something different happened during that last pregnancy and miscarriage. I stopped wanting sex all together. First because it was the fear of miscarriage. Then after the miscarriage I only felt the need to have sex when I was fertile. It's like I automatically got to the 6 month mark and forgot to inform my husband. I'm of course still there and these last 3 months have been hell on him. But apparently what we are both feeling is normal.
Men like to solve problems. I'm not pregnant. In my husbands mind having sex all the time will eventually solve my problem. I on the otherhand have been on such an emotional journey these past 16 months that I have no sex drive whatsoever and am only willing to do it when I do actually have a chance to conceive from it, about 6 - 10 days a month.
Baffled, my husband feels the need to tell me about the other women I knows pregnancies, in the bizarre effort to make me want sex. That only makes me not want it more. As I have mentioned previously, hearing about them is depressing, which is not conducive to upping my sex drive. He want to know how I expect to become pregnant if I don't have sex. Easy I tell him, those few days right before and during ovulation are more that enough sex for me to get pregnant. When I don't become pregnant, we try again. In his mind I'm sure he blames me thinking if only we had more sex, but I know that it doesn't matter. You only have a 1 in 5 chance of conceiving in any given month. It'll happen.
But the real problem isn't that fertility problems are killing our sex life. They're killing our intimacy. We are snippy at each other, especially when sex is concerned. It's a phase that'll pass. When I test positive all of a sudden it will all be worth it. But until then we are trapped each in our own mindset regarding our sex life.