With strangers, you're a blank slate
How going it alone helped me rediscover my sexuality after having kids
Hello and welcome to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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This week I’m excited to share the first Big Think, a long-form piece, in which I examine an aspect of sexual activity, culture, or behaviour in more depth. Got a suggestion for something you think I should cover? Let me know!
Primary carer, lone wolf: Returning to sex after kids
“Don’t leave me now, don’t break the spell…”
I’ve heard these words a hundred times but today something’s different. It’s not the timing or the location, I’m just walking to the bus stop. Still, something’s going on. I can feel it stirring.
“In heaven, lost my taste for hell…”
It’s a kind of heat? Or a longing? Or… no, wait, back up. It’s even more rudimentary than that. As the song launches into the hook, I realise what’s different today is this: today I can actually feel something.
For almost every big event in my life, there has been a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. Fever To Tell came out the year I started university. Graduating three years later, it was Show Your Bones. The year I met my husband, It’s Blitz! was rarely off my iPod. And in 2022, to mark the birth of my second child, Karen gave me Cool It Down. And now, today, walking up my street, this is what has finally broken through the fog, the exhaustion, the endless swirl of newborn needs, the total, total overwhelm.
The entire album is incandescent. I loved it the moment I first heard it. But this track, with its 80s drums and synth, its driving rhythm, its headiness, its horniness, has touched something. For four minutes and thirteen seconds, I feel truly like myself.
I’m lost and I’m lonely…
“You won’t have any of the identity crisis stuff second time around,” a friend told me. And that was true. Partly. I know how to be a mum, and I mostly know what sort of mum I am. First time around I felt fractured, fragmented. The fragments have since fused together, although it’s more scar tissue than glittering kintsugi. After two C-sections, I know a few things about scar tissue.
Second time around, it was less a coming-apart as a squeezing-together. My identity hasn’t fractured so much as flattened. I imagine the universe gently tamping me down, like coffee grinds. I’m on my fourth espresso of the day.
The paradox of motherhood is that it is excruciatingly lonely and yet you are never alone. The work of caring for a small child is both overstimulating and dreadfully, ruinously understimulating. Hours, days are spent almost entirely in my own head but unable to act on anything I find there—any ideas, any questions, any desires, any needs. Waiting tasks jangle like bunches of keys in my mind’s eye but there’s nothing I can do. I have to watch the baby, I have to change the baby, I have to feed, bathe, pick up, put down, soothe, play with, change, feed, watch the baby. Pacing round the kitchen, my wailing daughter wrapped in her sling against my chest, my overwhelming feeling is that I want someone to come and get me. My tummy hurts. I’m overtired. I’m having a bad time at the party. I want someone to come and pick me up. But no one’s coming. No one’s coming because I’m the grown up now and it’s my turn to instil that feeling in someone else, to provide them with that security, the knowledge that in times of distress someone will come and get them. I’m the primary carer, a term so loaded it might crush me. Because somehow, on top of all that, I’m also responsible for my own wellbeing. “Do make sure you look after yourself as well,” people tell you when you have a new baby. Lol okay.
If someone you love is having kids, the most important—like, viscerally significant—things you can do for that person are to keep them company and facilitate alone time.
The absence of adult company weighs heavily but it’s the lack of personal space and solitude that keeps me down. Six months go by, then eight, then ten. I feel subsumed by domesticity. I’m no longer a member of the household, I am the household, my kidneys and spleen merging with the chairs, the tables, the dustpan and brush, the bath taps. I barely feel like I exist in my own right.
One afternoon my husband makes a flirty overture. When I sigh he’s gentle. “I’m just letting you know you’re sexy and I fancy you.” I roll my eyes. Fucking great. Yet another thing someone wants from me.
I wish I could tell you I didn’t say that last part out loud but I did. I’m not exactly proud of it but I’m not exactly ashamed either. From Adrienne Rich to Mumsnet, much has been written about this feeling, this idea of “intimacy as chore,” following the birth of children. Sure, sex is about connection, a chance to rekindle mutual affection, but a lot of the time it feels like service, something you’re doing for someone else, or “for the good of the relationship.” Instinctively, I think a lot of us understand this. But to admit it—and I mean really admit it—to yourself, let alone utter it to your partner feels radical, rebellious.
People talk about being “touched out” when they have a new baby. They spend so much time holding the baby, cuddling the baby, being pawed at by chubby little hands, that when they put the baby down the last thing they want is more physical contact. For me it’s not so much the physical, it’s the psychological contact I don’t want. I don’t want to do anything that involves another person. I don’t want to think about another person, I don’t want to communicate with another person, I just want to be alone. Exquisitely fucking alone.
When I think about being alone I see it as a great expanse. It’s quiet. It’s still. I imagine myself unfolding into it.
In order to be sexual with someone else, you have to first figure out your own sexuality. We know this. We’ve heard it across the sexual wellness world, on social media, in magazines: In order to know what you want in bed, you need to experiment by yourself. In order to tell someone how to make you come, you have to figure out what you like. If you want to find love, you must first learn to love yourself. It’s the advice we give to teenagers, young women. It’s the journey I went on myself. I didn’t know I would have to do it all over again.
Then again, when I think about it, nothing could be more obvious. The transition into motherhood is often likened to adolescence. There is even a term for it: matrescence. It’s a complex social, psychological and physiological metamorphosis that we are only really beginning to study and understand empirically, as Lucy Jones documents in her new book, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. If motherhood has as profound an impact on our mind and body as adolescence, then it stands to reason that our sexuality would be part of that.
In any case, sexuality is a lifelong learning experience. It’s fluid. There is no arrival, only a sense of shifting and settling. I like to think of the inconstancy less as changes so much as revisions. I have not “become boring” since I had kids, I have merely “revised my position” on fun.
When couples are experiencing low desire, low sexual interest, therapists will recommend “self-expansion” activities. This means doing things outside of their daily routine, things that provide novelty, that offer opportunities to learn, that broaden their horizons, make them feel excited and inspired. Couples who engage in these sorts of activities together not only report higher levels of desire, and engage in sex more frequently, they also report greater satisfaction with those sexual experiences.
One of the reasons it’s thought to work is that it helps you see each other in a new light. In the fug of co-parenting, this can be a powerful thing. But date nights feel a way off, if I’m honest. Right now, it’s not my husband I need to see in a new light, it’s me.
I start to work on expanding myself. I need to get beyond my four walls. But coming up with something inspiring to do when you barely have the energy to put your shoes on proves tricky. I haven’t the bandwidth to research my options, to actually organise anything. So I go to the cinema. Every Monday evening, after the baby is in bed, I walk the ten minutes down the hill to West Norwood Picturehouse and catch the 8pm film. Sometimes there’s more than one screening around that time and I’m forced to engage my brain long enough to make a choice, but most of the time I just turn up and watch whatever’s on. Admittedly, this is how I lost 112 minutes of my life sitting through Magic Mike’s Last Dance. But even a terrible film has the ability to expand you, and, as I silently fume about the nonexistent vibes of this movie, the absolute dearth of chemistry between the lead characters, I am forced to concede I might still have some opinions, some feelings, about sex and relationships.
It’s around this time I have my musical epiphany on the way to the bus stop. “I’m hungry, like the wolf…” Karen sings and, in a moment so basic that I’m almost embarrassed to record it here, I think, “Yes. Yes I am.”
I want to feel cool, I want to feel creative, so I start picking out outfits again, instead of just throwing on whatever I left on the bedroom chair the night before. I exercise, I plan sewing projects, I read fiction, I go back to work. And when the summer rolls around I decide to go to a sex party. On my own.
“I just need to see how it feels to be in that sexual space, by myself,” I explain to my husband. To some extent he understands. Respecting each other's sexual and emotional autonomy is a cornerstone of our relationship. But he doesn’t really get it. He hasn’t experienced the compression of self that comes with being in total and prolonged service to your child, your family, your household. He doesn’t know what it’s like to have your identity folded up tightly until you barely recognise the shape; an origami mother.
And then there’s us. We are so enmeshed with one another at this point in time, our partnership a constant stream of negotiation and communication as we navigate neverending needs, sometimes our own, but mostly the kids’. We have become the parental unit. Literally another household appliance. Every part of my life right now has him in it. I cannot continue like this. My sexuality cannot be viewed, rediscovered, revised solely through the lens of “us”. I need to go to the party alone.
So I do. I travel up to East London, doing hypnobirthing breathwork on the Overground to calm my nerves (neither of my births ended up being natural but these breathing techniques have seen me through everything from post-surgery constipation and cervical smears, to job interviews, first dates, and threesomes). I can be whoever I feel like being this evening. I can be fabulous, powerful, gentle, vulnerable, silly, sensuous, assertive, coquettish. I can stalk around the space like a femme fatale, making wolfish, devastating eye contact with anyone who stumbles into my orbit. Nobody can tell me it’s out of character because they don’t know any different. In that moment of deciding who to be, what I want to do, how I want to feel, I don’t have to think about anyone else’s hopes, needs, expectations or desires. Whatever I want to channel, whether it’s a pre-existing or revised part of my sexuality, I am free to do so.
In Mind The Gap, Dr Karen Gurney explains that expressing ourselves sexually can sometimes feel easier with a stranger. You’re a blank slate, as far as they’re concerned, and this makes it possible to “show a wider variety of contrasting versions of our sexual selves.” There’s also another element and that’s the desire to see this revised sexual self reflected back to me. Esther Perel notes that cheating is very often a form of self-discovery, a quest for identity. “We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves,” she writes in The State of Affairs. To say I relate to this would be the understatement of the fucking year. I feel it in my bones. My husband adores me, my friends and family adore me. But they’ve seen too much. They know too well the version of me that’s tired, impatient, stressed, befuddled, greasy, repetitive, dull. I have been my worst self around them. That they can see past it and love me anyway is a precious and beautiful thing. That my husband can see past it and fancy me anyway seems an even greater miracle, frankly. I treat none of that lightly. But once in a while I’d like someone to not have to overlook my downsides. I don’t want to be seen as “on decent form, considering.” I’d like to turn up and be my best self, no caveats. I want to be witty, incisive, dynamic, vibrant and I want to see them seeing that.
I leave the party with four people’s numbers. As I’m waiting for my Uber the hostess asks if I had a good night. “Did you come by yourself?” she asks. I say I did, that it was my first time doing so, and that I loved it. I’m buzzing with adrenaline, high on my own image of myself. “Sometimes you just need to be able to show up and be whoever you are on the day,” I say. She nods knowingly.
My phone informs me that my driver has arrived. I put on my headphones, open Spotify, cue up Cool It Down, and step out into the humid Hackney air.
Into the wild with me…
This is when the story is supposed to wrap up. We’ve reached the denouement but no resolution is at hand. I did not “find myself” in the arms of strangers, between their fingers, beneath their palms and tongues. I had a good time. I felt a bit sexy. I felt a bit powerful. And then I went home to bed. I got up the next day and put a wash on and wondered what to make the kids for tea.
The story spills outside of the lines. I still lack time and energy, I still feel overwhelmed. I crave solitude like it’s a physiological deficiency, sneaking off to the loo just to be alone for a few moments. I’m no longer flat but neither have I fully unfolded. I’m starting to appreciate sex as a means of connection again, whether that’s deep and intimate or fleeting and frivolous. Now and again, other people pique my interest, my husband among them, not just for what they can show me about myself but for what we might share, what we might do together. In the months after my daughter was born, sex felt like yet another demand on my time, my energy, my body, my psyche. But slowly I’m beginning to revise my position.
Research:
Goss, Sophie, et al. “Feeling Close and Seeing a Partner in a New Light: How Self-Expansion Is Associated With Sexual Desire.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, vol. 39, no. 8, SAGE Publishing, Mar. 2022, pp. 2478–506, doi:10.1177/02654075221081137.
Muise, Amy, et al. “Broadening Your Horizons: Self-expanding Activities Promote Desire and Satisfaction in Established Romantic Relationships.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 116, no. 2, American Psychological Association, Feb. 2019, pp. 237–58, doi:10.1037/pspi0000148.
One last thought…
When Anne Helen Peterson’s newsletter,
(which I love and recommend) landed in my inbox this weekend, containing an interview with writer , author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, it felt like providence. I had already written this newsletter but I was startled by how much of what I wanted to say, what I was trying to get at, was reflected in Montei’s words. Referencing the term “touched out” she tells Peterson:What do you think? If you don’t have kids, are there aspects of this experience you can relate to in a different way perhaps? If you do, did having kids affect your sexual identity and behaviour?