Working Mother, February/March 2007
Like most working moms, Elizabeth, a northern NJ mother of two, has a detailed daily list of things to do in order to keep her household running. Somewhere on that list, buried way beneath walking the dogs, feeding the cats, doing laundry and taking her daughter to ballet, is a mental note to have sex with her husband. Though Elizabeth and her husband are trying to get pregnant, the only time they can squeeze in sex is 2am. The quality of this sleep-drunk sex is such that often, they get up in the morning wondering if they’ve even made love at all. “The situation saddens me, but while sex is perpetually at the top of my husband’s list, I have so much to do that I’d have to bump something off my list to find the time,” says Elizabeth. “Sex may be the glue that holds a relationship together, but of course it’s the mother who has to remember to pick up the glue on her way home from work!”

While men are purportedly the ones constantly thinking about sex, chances are, whether you’re wondering how to have more of it, or are calculating ways to fight your husband off so you can just sleep, damn it!, it’s on your mind too. We asked 800 working mothers about their sex lives and got responses like “Sex? What sex?” and “Three words: JUST SO TIRED.” A whopping 73 percent said that they are unsatisfied with either the quantity or the quality of sex they’re having, and one woman said she and her husband were intimate so infrequently, she felt like she had her grandmother’s sex life. Interestingly enough, studies show that our grandmothers had more sex than we do. “Fifty years ago, there was a clear division of labor and one of the wife’s responsibilities in tending to domestic affairs was to fulfill her husband’s sexual needs,” says Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men: Eight Ways to Win Your Wife’s Heart Forever. “Back then, women had sex at least twice a week; two thirds of today’s young wives are too tired to match that rate.”

One of the obvious reasons that sex rates have dropped is that more women now work outside the home, but are still, for the most part, the ones who take care of household responsibilities. Simply put, life gets in the way. Seventy percent of our respondents said that their sex life got worse after having children; between work, kids and housework, they just don’t have the time or energy for sex.

But that’s the easy explanation. According to Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity; Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic, there are societal and cultural reasons that our sex lives often sag after we’ve had kids. To get our sexual relationships back to what they once were, we’ve got to scrape away the surface excuses of fatigue and indolent husbands. Underneath, we’ll find surprising truths.

Survival of the least sexy
When Jenni, of Fort Lauderdale, FL, had her son a year ago, her interest in sex vanished. At first, she says simply, “I was breastfeeding and didn’t want another person tugging at my breasts!” She was also resentful that her husband had time to socialize with his friends while she was up to her elbows in dirty diapers and unwashed dishes.

“It’s hard to let go and enjoy being with my husband because I’m always thinking of all that has to get done,” says Jenni. But there’s likely a much more deeply ingrained reason that Jenni, as a new mother, is giving her husband the cold shoulder in the bedroom. According to Dr. Edward Laumann, author of The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States, women with children under the age of six are three times less likely to be interested in sex than other women. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense—back when we were hunters and gatherers, a woman couldn’t very well escape danger with more than one young child in tow, and so she avoided sex while her child was young to ensure survival. That historical hardwiring is today further reinforced by the fact that women are exhausted. “Not having sex is a protective defense,” says Dr. Laumann. “You don’t want to have another child if you can hardly stand up!”

Blame the Government
Part of the reason women are so tired is that generally, everything falls on their plate. This in turn builds resentment, but while women sometime lash out at their husbands for not helping out more at home, Perel says the blame is somewhat misplaced: “Yes, many husbands could be doing more, but the real issue is that there is a complete lack of support for parents in this country,” she says. “This is the only industrialized nation [other than Australia] that doesn’t have standardized, paid maternity leave, and where maternity leave is considered a disability.” Perel has counseled couples in Europe, where there is more governmental support for working mothers, and says she does not see the chronic resentment that American women exhibit as a result of their isolation and lack of support.

Resentment sets up a dangerous pattern, where the husband is continually asking for sex while the wife withholds it. Paige, a mom of two in Gainsville, GA, realized it was time to change things when her husband begged: “Just show some interest in me. It doesn’t have to be a night of all out sex, just a kiss or something, anything that shows you love me.”

“My knee jerk reaction was to say, ‘I’ve got a million things to do and you want me to stop and focus on you?’” says Paige. “But I realized he was right. He was generally getting what was left over after I’d given to everybody else.”

Sex vs. Cuddle Time
Common belief is that sex often suffers because all this giving depletes a woman’s energy. According to Perel, that’s just a small part of it. Her hypothesis is that women, who are far more easily fulfilled by an emotional rather than a sexual connection, become so enamored with their children that there’s less need for sex with their husbands. “The erotic ingredients necessary for a healthy sex life—novelty, curiosity, imagination, sensuality—are transferred from the husband to the child,” Perel says. Women plan play dates for their children, but few dates with their spouses; there are “languorous hugs for the kids, while the grown ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks,” says Perel. “Mothers might say: ‘I’m so tired, I have no time for sex,’ but what they really mean is: ‘I have a sensual connection with my child and am getting everything I need from him or her.’”

Sarah, a Brooklyn, NY mother, was completely enraptured by her son, now 3, when he was born: “I had this perfect, soft, cuddly little creature to bathe, nurse and care for,” she says. “My son adores me in this completely uncomplicated way—there’s no agenda, no fighting, none of this grown up nonsense; it’s just this beautiful, pure love.”

Sarah’s 6’3” husband was, by contrast, not quite so cuddly, and Sarah became disinterested in sex. She had seen this happen with some of her girlfriends, but this was often because they resented their husbands for not doing enough at home; Sarah’s husband was supportive and did his share of the chores. “The problem,” says Sarah, “is that while my husband and I worked well together, once our son was born, we forgot how to play together.”

Put the Sizzle Back in Sex
Playing together is the key to getting derailed sex lives back on track. Perel challenges couples to try to recapture the erotic energy that they had early on in their relationship by momentarily abandoning their roles as parents and rediscovering themselves as sexual beings. “Create a space where you are not mom and dad, but a couple,” she says. Paige found her relationship with her husband improved drastically once she started spontaneously hugging and flirting with him. He’d complained that she usually ignored him and ran to her children when she got home from work, so she made a point of kissing him first.

The goal is not to just have more sex, but to create a level of intimacy that will allow a sexual relationship to flourish. Every evening at around 8pm, after Lisa, a Leesburg, VA mother, and her husband put their daughter to bed, they lie on their bed together for 15 minutes. They came up with this as a way to reconnect with each other. Sometimes they just talk, other times they make love. “We’ve worked on it to a point that now it’s a habit,” says Lisa. “Sometimes my husband doesn’t want to lie on the bed and chat, say if there’s a football game on, but he sees how happy it makes me and so he does it.”

Though our survey revealed that 22 percent of working moms have sex less than 12 times a year, 44 percent have sex once or twice a week. These are women who, like Lisa, work at it, and realize that spontaneous sex as a working mother is a beautiful myth. “When you don’t have kids, you can do it whenever you want,” says Lisa. “Now it means scheduling, and making sex a priority, though it’s easy not to. Just because we’re mothers doesn’t give us the excuse to stop being wives and lovers.”

Heather, a northern California mother of two, and her husband have turned planning their sex lives into a fun little competition. For her entire seven years of marriage, she has made note of each time she and her husband make love by putting a heart on the calendar. They up their output on months when they notice the numbers slipping. At the end of each year, they tally up and set goals for the next. “Having sex on our standard to do list makes us accountable to each other,” says Heather. “When you measure something, it gets done!”

It isn’t easy, and might seem selfish even, to shift focus away from children and other responsibilities back to sexual needs, but the bottom line is that it’s necessary to keep a relationship alive. So even if you have a list of things to do and frankly, aren’t in the mood, just do it. “Sex is like exercise,” says Heather, “You might not always want to do it, but you’ll feel better if you do.”

Sexual Healing
Sure, sex is fun, but did you know it can also improve your skin tone, reduce cancer risk and ward off the sniffles? Here, six healthy reasons to get it on:
1. A roll in the hay keeps the doctor away: Researchers at Wilkes University have found another line of defense for the cold season—biweekly doses of sex raise levels of immunoglobulin A, an antibody that boosts the immune system.
2. Less Stress: Making love lowers blood pressure for up to a week. A recent study also shows that people who had regular sex did the best in a public speaking stress test.
3. C’mon, Get Happy! Sex stimulates the release of oxytocin and other “feel-good”‘ hormones, making you happier.
4. Just for Men: A National Cancer Institute study reveals that sex might protect men against prostate cancer and heart disease.
5. Get that glow: Sex releases DHEA, which helps repair tissue and keeps skin healthy. A British study shows couples with a regular sex life look younger than their peers.
6. Not tonight, dear, I have a headache: Sorry, this is no longer a valid excuse; Endorphins released during sex have been shown to relieve pain caused by arthritis, PMS and, yes, headaches.

Help for Husbands
A guide to getting a little more lovin’.
1. Foreplay is your friend. “We have a Chihuahua who likes to hump my kids’ toys,” says Jenni, a New Jersey mother of two. “That’s basically what my husband does to me—he goes straight for the kill!” If this too is your approach, you know it doesn’t work. Try giving your wife a massage; you’ll probably get better results.
2. Pick up a broom—it’s almost as good as foreplay. The one thing survey respondents say would increase their husbands’ odds of getting lucky more than anything else is to help more with the housework. Bonus points for husbands who tackle cleaning up proactively rather than waiting to be asked.
3. Treat her like a lady. Remember all the dates you planned and the things you did to woo your wife? Start doing them again. Paige’s husband sent her roses, drew her a bubble bath, and set up a picnic in their bedroom, complete with wine and homemade chocolate shells. This made Paige very, very happy.