In Great Debates there is a thread about what it would be like if women had the same sex drives as men. This reminded me of something I have read before, that for married couples many experience major sex problems after they have kids, either one or both partners lose interest. Naturally there are some reasons for this like the extra workload ruining the mood, having to act more responsibly as parents instead of just a couple, being afraid the kids will hear you etc but are there any biological reasons for why people lose interest in sex after they have kids? Since sex is designed mostly as a method of having children once those children are born does the brain say ‘ok, thats enough of that foolishness’ and just shut the sex drive down? We eat for emotional reasons as well as biological reasons, but if you are hungry for biological reasons then eat a large dinner you lose interest in food altogether. Do people have the same situation with sex where once they have kids they just lose interest because on a deeper biological level they realize that there is no reason to do it anymore? Or is it all psychological and/or temporary?
I know that this wouldn’t really make sense because throughout 99% of human history about 50-80% of kids died before age 6. So having a child alone wouldn’t kill sex drive, something about the child surviving would have to alter the brain chemistry of the parents.
Who in the world told you people lose interest? My grand parents had happy sex until they died (not from the sex)
Healthy active people don’t lose interest because they have children. There isn’t a biological reason.
People get old, and out of shape, that may make it more difficult.
Middle aged men sometimes have anxiety as their bodies start to age, and not respond as easily as it did in youth.
The reasons you list in some combination or other are the only reasons. There is no bio clock telling us to put it away.
Here are just a few sites of the thousands on sexuality and aging.
I think it could be reasonably argued that, in animals where there is a duty of parental care, a shift of emphasis away from procreation and towards care of the infants, could be a selectable factor. If you’re genetically prone to be shagging in the cave while the sabre-tooth munches your kids, you might be at a disadvantage compared to your peers who have cooled off a bit and are keeping their eyes open.
I think the OP question has to do with people who currently have small kids, not your empty-nesters. And as someone who has been married 22 years, with kids ages 9 and 5, I have to vote for the “exhaustion” explanation. I expect to be in full swing next decade.
And how did you know your grandparents did the nasty till they died? Was this a topic of conversation around the Thanksgiving turkey?
This is actually a fairly good question, as I hear this a LOT. And being female, I have no problem in saying: seems like it’s always the woman who loses interest and pushes him away. So is it something about being a mother?
IIRC, there’s protein in breast milk which reduces sex drive and fertility - for the mother. This can last up to two years (when child is presumably no longer in need of constant supervision), although women may still get interested in lovemaking off and on in that period.
Of course there’s a biological reason in early infanthood: the hormone prolactin reduces libido dramatically in women. A woman who’s sex drive remains high while there’s a baby at the breast is rarely going to be able to breastfeed while pregnant, or to sustain a healthy pregnancy while breastfeeding, and so is not generally reproductively successful. This should wear off when she stops breastfeeding.
*Please note, I said “rarely” and meant it. There are some women, especially with today’s multi-vitamins and other medical advances, who can healthily breastfeed and gestate at once, but it’s a pretty new phenomenon and not achievable by the majority of women.
Interestingly, I remember reading years ago (but don’t have a cite at the moment) that infants will wake and cry if their mothers are sexually aroused. “They” were positing that the infant can smell arousal pheremones and act to prevent intercourse between their [del]servants[/del] parents, lest a challenger be conceived. It seems that this talent goes away in toddlerhood, when a sibling is no longer dangerous to the existing offspring.
The tone of the op to me sounded like the thought once its over, its over. I was trying to point out that maybe there’s a lag for a while, but its nothing physiological. I guess I was trying to say, there is hope.
Well, I didn’t know… until I accidently walked in on them one afternoon. I had to wash my brain with lots of soap :rolleyes:
The same thing happened to my ex-husband with his own grandparents…
I have no better cite for this than my female relatives’ gossip, but very young children require 24-hour care and attention - possibly sleep deprivation and lack of free time have as much to do with it as hormones and proteins.
No, not all of them. WhyBaby was at the hospital for 3.5 months, so we weren’t watching her all the time. OK, so there was plenty of stress there, but by the time she came home, she was sleeping 10 hours at night. Plenty of time for us to get hot and bothered. But not only have we rarely had sex, I don’t even masturbate any more - just not interested. I’m pretty sure it’s the hormones.
To each their own, I guess, but I’ve never understood this reason. I’ve worked my butt and brain off all day long for most of my life and at bedtime have never said, “no” because I was tired. I have said “no” or just not been in the mood for other very specific reasons. How much energy does it take even if you go at a slow & easy pace? Or even just be passively “serviced” which can be as fun/emotionally constructive as a full on 3 hour whips & chains session? I can’t be the only one who would gladly invest one last little bit of energy toward a good night’s sleep and a little more emotional unity with my wife.
IMHO “I’m Too Tired” = “Don’t Care about that anymore except when it’s convenient for me.”
I think the urge to do it like bunnies, as opposed to say, pandas depends entirely on how good a match you are for your mate’s brain. Some folks manage to stay interesting to one another over the long term and stay in the game. Others cave in to the pressures of parenthood/daily grind to make ends meet andbecome uninteresting to their mate and even to themselves and so just aren’t seen as worth sacrificing 20 minutes of sleep for.
Right. If you’re breastfeeding, at least, there’s a very strong biological drive not to get pregnant again. Not only are breastfeeding women less horny, they’re a good deal less fertile as well. This is not universal - you can’t rely on it - but breastfeeding for a longer period of time than we do in the West is a very basic family planning tool used in all ‘primitive’ societies.
That suggestion that babies are preprogrammed to interrupt the fun by crying is a pretty fascinating bit of research, incidentally . . .
While doing some genealogical work, I found many examples of women who had a baby every. single. year. until they either died or became too old. So whatever the natural frequency is, it’s quite sufficient. Of course back then a goodly percentage of those children died in infancy, but going by the birth and death dates, the next bambino was already well underway.
This strikes me as unnecessarily judgemental. Libidos can vary markedly even among healthy individuals. In general, men, especially, may take their prowess and responsiveness for granted … until one day – for many (if not all) of them – it just all goes away. And these men might well get no warning.
Also – for many men, responsiveness can become a huge issue when sleep is deprived.
For me, my libido went down because I was bone tired exhausted, not have-been-busy-at-work-all-day exhausted.
That and at the worst points I had had a baby hanging off one boob or the other for 8 of the past 24 hours, plus I had been holding him for another few hours, I was SICK of being touched.
If my husband had managed to get at me without touching me in any way, I might have been amenable!
So yes, exhaustion and being “touched out” are two huge factors in after kid sex dropping off.
It’s exhaustion. As Hokkaido Brit noted, you can get seriously exhausted. I never had too much trouble with being ‘touched out,’ as many people do (understandably), but I can get very tired indeed. It gets better when the kids get a little older.
Well, my grandmother was pretty upfront about that, though not over Thanksgiving dinner. But she had quite a bit to say in private about it. My grandmother may not have been your usual kind of grandmother, I don’t know.
