Parent Time

Think back, if you can, to life with your partner before sleepwalking tots invaded your bed on a nightly basis, and when grey was the shade of your favourite sweater instead of those stray hairs that keep sprouting out of your scalp.

A hallmark of that early-relationship period was likely the amazing (and frequent) sex that accompanied it. “Rutting like weasels,” my friends and I used to call it. But with children now in the picture, many of those same couples have gone from “weasel sex” to weaseling out of sex. Plug yourself into any conversation with a group of parents and the theme of “not getting any and, frankly, not wanting any” is a common one. “All the stars have to be aligned for me to even think about sex. Work has to be OK, no stresses regarding the kids, no school homework,” muses Kate,* a full-time student and mom of two boys.

It isn’t just women who watch their libidos take a nosedive. According to Ellen Starr, a marital and sexual therapist at the Canadian Men’s Clinic in Toronto, it is often the man who’s experiencing decreased sexual desire.

For couples experiencing such a downshift, the change can be puzzling: I still love my spouse, so why aren’t we “doing it” anymore? According to the experts, there are lots of reasons, both psychological and physical, for a dip in desire — and for those who want to reignite the passion in their marriage, there are solutions to just about every one of those reasons.

*Names withheld by request.

Originally published in Today's Parent, February 2007