Sorry honey, not tonight & here’s why.

I’ve written a few times about how I find sex post kids, I mean, frequently I feel touched out and overwhelmed. It’s not that I don’t want to have sex with my husband… I just… feel so over touched that the thought of yet another person needing me, grabbing me or petting me after a day of being mauled by a breastfeeding baby, tugged at by a four year old and whinged at by a six year old is enough to make me pull an Edvard Munch face before running screaming from the room.

One of the things that I find the most challenging about this lack of interest in sex is communicating how I’m feeling to my wonderful husband. I am often snappy and brusque, quick to just say “NO, I’m not in the mood” or worse still “Get off me I just want to be left alone”. A horrible way to communicate with your partner because it truly doesn’t explain how you feel, it is a symptom of how you feel – not wanting to be touched that is – but what about the cause. I can’t imagine being on the receiving end of constant no’s for physical intimacy without any sort of articulation as to why. That’s a huge part of the problem and it’s a very British one isn’t it? We’re renowned for being stiff upper lip, easy to embarrass and innately private – in fact in a recent study by LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor it turns out that more and more of us are turning to Google instead of our GPs because we have become so private and embarrassed about talking about our bodies, especially when it comes to sexual or mental health. Incidentally if you are one of these people you can actually find a much more reliable source of information on onlinedoctor.lloydspharmacy.com instead of panicking yourself with Dr. Google. Anyway, I digress.

My point is that it’s really important to try and talk to each other openly, especially about our bodies and the way we are feeling post children. It’s so hard to express the emotions that course through us, almost impossible to articulate the feeling of being “touched out” to someone who has never experienced it. I never understood until I had Edith, I always used to think it was a nicer way of saying “I’m too tired for that shit” or “I just can’t be arsed”. It’s not, it’s very different and often you find that you want to have sex – mentally, you’re ready and waiting, posed like a roman goddess preparing for her version of Christian Grey to bombarded her booty with that good good – but physically you just can’t bring yourself to embrace the passion your mind is craving. That in itself is a horrible feeling. Sometimes it’s the other way around, you’re hot under the collar then the fun begins and your mind shuts down, pleading for no more touching, no more invading of personal space. It’s been commented before that being “touched out” can be closely linked to post natal depression – another thing we just don’t talk about enough, and something that we should be able to discuss, especially with our partners. If not the people that know you the best, love you completely, then who?

Being touched out, and the inability to communicate it is a nightmare for a lot of couples. I find my husband hotter than Tom Hardy reading a bed time story in the buff win just the book to protect his modesty (happy to create an e-petition for that to be a thing) but more often than not, I can’t bring myself to get intimate and I struggle to express that. Or he struggles to hear it.

How about you? Can you make like Salt n Peppa and talk about sex baby?