The bedroom of parents

Here are two neat little pieces on the bedroom of parents.

First, here’s an interesting little article by Tara Parker-Pope (how much fun is it saying that name aloud?) from the New York Times about co-sleeping, saying basically that we’re co-sleeping with our children in much greater numbers than we admit. Come out, come out wherever you are, you fibbers. (In the United States co-sleeping has more than doubled in less than ten years, although don’t forget that a century ago it was much, much more common). Of those who are co-sleeping with babies and children - some of us are doing it whole-heartedly, some of us are doing it resentfully, and some of us are living in denial land – doing it quietly because it is how you all get some sleep but you don’t like to tell anyone for fear of being ridiculed by my sister-in-law (gees I hope she never gets herself a computer and gets on-line). 

Surely one of our biggest modern fears about co-sleeping is what damage it may potentially be doing to parents’ sex lives. At the risk of sounding dreary, have we elevated the importance of our sex life too far? I’m not sure that this fear reflects rational thinking. The tut-tutters of co-sleeping wonder if co-sleeping is a sign that your partnership is in, or about to be in, big trouble. The New York Times article touches upon this with some largely reassuring research you’ll be glad to know, but it is this piece here that really got me thinking about the pitfalls of parenting and intimacy.. and it’s not a problem isolated to co-sleeping. I never saw this Andrew Denton interview with sex therapist Esther Perel but the transcript is available and she has a really logical view in my opinion. I’ve explored this idea before when I discussed Ayelet Waldman’s ideas on the competition between love for your child and love for your partner, but something about the way Perel presents her views on ‘erotic energy’ seems less threatening and more solvable than Waldman’s warnings.

Having re-read this post I’ve come back to clarify that I am not about this Bettina Arndt crap - ie. when you’re done with the cooking and putting the baby to sleep, then have sex with your husband as your wifely duty to keep the family intact. I’m thinking about a couple’s focus on itself, joint responsibility and reward, not just looking at a woman’s focus on her partner. And I think Perel’s way of expressing this appeals to me because she doesn’t talk about it as a mother’s responsibility, she sees it as a couple’s responsibility, and she doesn’t necessarily pitch this reponsibility in opposition to parental responsibility, she just says that some of that playfulness and enthusiasm that parents have could be directly towards each other every now and then.

Anyway, here is the relevant bit on parents:

ANDREW DENTON: What about the conflict that arises between having kids and having a strong and satisfying sexual life? How often does that arise? How do you confront that?

ESTHER PEREL: See, I think that one of the things to me that was very important in trying to understand the transition to parenthood was to see if there was something else than just people are too busy, too tired and too stressed, not because it’s not real. I have two children and I think it’s eh very, very real. But at the same time it occurred to me that when people fall in love they’re often not working less and they’re often not less stressed. And so what happens often in the transition to parenthood, is that two things are happening today.

One, I think we are in the west certainly facing a kind of unprecedented child centrality in which parents seem to often devote their entire erotic energies to their children. So when you tell them sex after kids, they tell you what? Sex? You must be kidding. But when you tell them OK, let’s not talk about sex, let’s talk about erotic energy, playfulness, it’s extraordinary how much parents are able to play with their children, to look for novelty, to look for the latest things to do to be original. The kids get to wear the latest fashion, the adults walk around in their old coloured sweat pants. The kids get to experience novelty all the time, the adults go for the same old, same old. And the kids get to experience the languorous hugs, when the adults have to do with a diet of quick pecks. And when you look at it, it looks like it’s basically the erotic energy is alive and well but it’s Eros redirected.

ANDREW DENTON: So how do you maintain an erotic connection and that mystery and also have kids?

ESTHER PEREL: It’s not about people just being able to have sex. It’s about people being able to create a space where they can relate as adults and eroticism is to cultivate pleasure for its own sake, in which sex sometimes can occur and often will but it’s not just for that. It’s a place where you can remember to ask your partner a question about themselves and not go out on a date to talk about the kids. It’s a place where you can still dream together about the other things that you may want to do in life sometimes. It’s that erotic space and sometimes people can have it in their home. Sometimes they need to leave the premises. Sometimes they get it when they go on vacation. It’s not often easy and certainly in the first three years it’s very, very hard so if you get it every once in a while, it goes a long way.