Podcast: ‘Sex & Intimacy After Children’ with Zac Fine & Marijke Roberts

Why Parenthood Threatens Intimacy and What It Actually Takes to Choose Each Other Through It

(Love and Cherish Podcast with Zac Fine and Marijke Roberts)

Listen To the ‘Love & Cherish’ Podcast

In this third team episode of the Love and Cherish podcast, I’m again joined by two therapists from my practice, Zac Fine and Marijke Roberts.

This time, we’re talking about something that comes up constantly in my work with couples: what happens to sex and intimacy after children arrive. It’s a topic Zac suggested, and it’s one I think deserves far more honest conversation than it gets. Because the arrival of a baby can be quietly devastating to a couple’s sexual bond, and most people either don’t talk about it, or don’t talk about it until it’s too late.

👉 Meet the team and book online sessions here: https://laurahow.com/online-therapists/

Why Having a Baby Can Be the Beginning of the End for Intimacy

Zac opens by naming something he sees repeatedly in his clients: that the arrival of children can mark the point where intimacy disappears. The child won’t sleep, or ends up in the marital bed, and it becomes easier to keep doing what you’re doing than to find your way back to each other.

Marijke speaks from her own experience of new motherhood, twenty-five years ago now, describing those early weeks as pure survival. She and her husband slept separately simply because neither of them could function otherwise. She’s honest that she can see, in retrospect, how that kind of practical arrangement can become an excuse to avoid intimacy long after the reason for it has passed.

What strikes me about this is how much couples need someone to tell them in advance. Not to frighten them, but to prepare them. To say: this is going to be hard, you might lose connection for a while, but if you can make a promise to each other now to keep prioritising each other through it, the difficulty doesn’t have to become the distance.

The Resentment Trap: What New Mothers (and New Fathers) Don’t Say Out Loud

Zac raises the question of maternal resentment, and it’s one worth sitting with. The new mother is exhausted, her body has changed, she often feels entirely responsible for this small person, and her husband gets to leave the house for work. Even if his day is genuinely difficult, it can feel, from where she’s standing, like freedom. Like he gets to carry on being himself while she is being remade into something she doesn’t recognise.

Marijke is candid that she felt this. The resentment, the exhaustion, the sense that his life was easier than hers. What she and her husband couldn’t do at the time was say it without it becoming an accusation. He’d get defensive, she’d feel unheard, and they’d go nowhere. It took years, and counselling, and the slow work of understanding their own attachment patterns, before they could talk about it differently.

My own experience was different, and I think the reason was Russ. I never felt that particular brand of resentment toward him, not because motherhood wasn’t hard, but because he showed up so consistently that there was no real ground for it to grow on. He was doing everything he could to reach me, to make me feel loved, to pull me back toward myself at a time when I was at real risk of disappearing into the role of mother and losing the woman underneath it.

How Russ Made Me His Muse: Reclaiming Sexuality After a Baby

What Russ did, and I share this because I genuinely believe it might help someone, was turn me into his muse. He’s a photographer, and what emerged over those years when Charlie was small became something we called China Blue. It started quietly. He noticed I’d started wearing nothing but black, dowdy clothes that were slowly making me feel worse. We went through my wardrobe and replaced it. He started buying outfits. We’d put Charlie to bed, put music on, open a bottle of wine, and create. It became this extraordinary private world that Charlie had no idea existed, cleared away before morning.

I’d never felt that sexy. I’d never felt that young or that alive. Part of what made it so powerful was that I hadn’t had it as a teenager either, so in some ways it wasn’t reclaiming something so much as discovering it for the first time. Russ introduced me to myself. He showed me I had beautiful eyes. He showed me I had intrinsic value, not because he told me so, but because of what he created around me.

I say this knowing that men watching will think it sounds like a lot of work. It is. But what do you want? Because the alternative, the slow drift, the porn in the toilet while she thinks you’ve lost your libido, the resentment hardening into something colder, is so much worse.

When Men Check Out: Porn, Resentment, and the Cost of Not Leaning In

Marijke raises what happens when men don’t lean in. When the baby arrives and they feel pushed out, and instead of turning toward that feeling and doing something with it, they go elsewhere. More nights out. More screen time. Porn, most commonly, because it’s so accessible and so easy to hide. She’s direct about how painful that is for a woman who has just given birth and is already struggling with her body and her identity. To then feel she’s competing with a nineteen-year-old on a phone screen is not a small thing.

Zac is clear that this isn’t about blaming men. He’s honest that many men become genuinely lost after the arrival of a child. There’s a real confusion now about what a father is supposed to be, what he’s supposed to want, what kind of man he’s supposed to look like. And when a man gets stuck in an antagonistic frame with his partner and stays there long enough, the consequences are serious. Not just for the marriage, but for the children. Zac doesn’t soften this. If you’re struggling after having a baby and you think avoiding it will make it better, it won’t. The costs compound.

The Crucible: Why This Moment Is the Perfect Ingredient for Change

Marijke brings in a concept I love from David Schnarch, the idea of the crucible. The point in a relationship where everything comes to a head, where the heat is turned up and you are faced with a choice. She reflects that the couples she sees in sexless marriages are often the ones who didn’t choose. Who stayed on the default path, neither fully in nor fully out, neither addressing what was broken nor deciding to repair it.

What Russ and I went through when Charlie was small was genuinely make or break. We were close to it. I was set to do exactly what I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do, to recreate what my parents had modelled. And what pulled me back was not a grand gesture but a choice. A decision that it was worth trying. That the kids were worth it, even if I wasn’t yet convinced we were.

Doing that takes courage. To dare to be sexual, to dare to want it to be good, to aim toward a mutually satisfying bond with one person over a lifetime, against every piece of cultural messaging telling you it’s either impossible or not worth the effort. That is genuinely radical. It is also, I think, one of the most important things you can do.

The Danger of Anti-Marriage Messaging and the Company You Keep

If you’re struggling, be careful about who you spend time with and what you’re consuming. Friends who routinely slag off their husbands or their wives are not neutral company. That kind of thinking is contagious, and it does real damage to your ability to see your own marriage clearly.

Seek out people and voices who are genuinely positive about marriage. Who believe it’s worth the work. Not because they’re naive, but because they’ve been through something and come out the other side. If you can’t find that in your immediate circle, podcasts are a starting point. Surround yourself with evidence that it’s possible.

Marijke makes a point that stays with me: the greatest gift you can give your children is to be getting on. She grew up hearing one parent berate the other, and the pain of that doesn’t leave. Even now, as an adult, she finds it hard. She’s in her fifties. Her father is long gone. Her mother is nearly ninety-three, and she can still be bitter. That’s how long unprocessed resentment lasts. And it is felt by the children, not just in childhood, but for the whole of their lives.

A Sexy, Stable Marriage Is the Greatest Gift You Can Give Your Children

Laura closes by returning to where we started. Sex is at the heart of the best version of a marriage. If you want your husband to be playful, energised, warm, and present, you cannot quietly decide at some point that you’re no longer going to engage with him in that way. That’s not a judgement. It’s just a natural law. You can want it to be otherwise, but wanting doesn’t change it.

There is usually some work for women to do in making sense of this. Some journey toward understanding why the sexual bond matters, not just to him, but to the marriage, and to the family. It won’t slide quietly off the table. He’s fully aware it’s there.

What a magnificent thing, though, if you can do a good job of it. If the home you build is predominantly sane and steady and stable, and if it’s sexy as well, that is the story people spend their lives hoping for.

Work With Me or My Team

If this conversation resonates with you and you’d like support, you’re very welcome to reach out. Zac, Marijke, and I all work with individuals and couples around intimacy, attachment, and long-term relationship difficulties.

👉 Meet the team and book online sessions here:
https://laurahow.com/online-therapists/

Join the Conversation

We’ll be recording this podcast monthly. If you have questions you’d like us to explore in future episodes, please leave them in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.