Intimacy after childbirth

With pregnancy and the arrival of children, the woman's body undergoes changes that can affect the full enjoyment of relationships as a couple. Medicine supported by technology and its benefits offers procedures that guarantee sexual satisfaction for the sake of comprehensive well-being.

There are many changes that life as a couple experiences after childbirth and these respond to different causes. We have changes that mainly go in the reduction of sexual frequency and in the perception of the relationship in both women and men.

In the postpartum period, whether by caesarean section or vaginal delivery, the main concern of the parents is the newborn: the mother is breastfeeding every two or three hours, dedicated to changing diapers, taking care of the child's clothes and the relationship with the couple. goes to the background. The amount of care that the child demands is such that up to three months can go by without the parents having sex, despite the fact that the medical restriction is 40 days.

If it is a couple in which the father understands and identifies with what the process of pregnancy and childbirth means and how demanding care for the newborn is, if the delivery was vaginal and there were no complications, and of course If the woman is well connected with her femininity and sexuality, after the "famous 40 days" of quarantine, a reunion of the couple will take place.

However, this reunion process can be affected by many factors, including the fact that many times the woman concentrates so much on her new baby that she usually puts aside her interest in maintaining intimacy with her partner.

It is also very common for women to notice the changes that their body has undergone during pregnancy and childbirth: as the belly stretches, the genitals change in color, appearance and volume; the blood vessels, mainly the veins of the vagina can in some cases come out as varicose; sometimes leading her to become self-conscious for not feeling sexy enough by avoiding the sexual encounter.

In other cases, the man is inhibited because he does not know how to be part of the mother-child pairing, the woman feels less desirable due to the changes her body has undergone and the hormonal changes can condition the appearance of postpartum depression, the man perceives it and He walks away, waiting for the woman to feel connected with him again to restart their intimate life.

Dr. Sofía Herrera Mendoza, a gynecologist in Venezuela, a specialist in endoscopic surgery, pelvic floor surgery, intimate aesthetics and menopause, from the Esteti-K Medical Institute explains that if the birth was natural, the changes at the level of the vulva and vaginal canal will be greater, it can there may even be external scars if there was a need to make cuts in the pelvic floor, even flaccidity in the vaginal canal. “This all depends on many factors. There are women who by nature have very firm muscles, ligaments and supporting structures, others do not. This is perceived at the time of the relationship and more in a penetration, the women describe it with these words: I do not perceive my husband's penis”.

The good news is that there are always solutions!

Faced with these problems, medicine today offers three treatments that seek to return the couple to their sexual fullness, these treatments range from the least to the most invasive:

The first is the targeted stimulation of the pelvic floor by physiotherapy, which can be done either with electrostimulation in the office and/or at home, or through exercises designed to tone and give more strength to the pelvic floor muscles, which are those muscles that support the vagina and pelvic organs in the lower abdomen.

These exercises, known as “Kegel exercises, should ideally be practiced by women before, during and after pregnancy. And in general, throughout their position, they are exercises that will help not only to prevent the appearance of flaccidity and vaginal prolapse, but will also contribute to improving the enjoyment and sexual pleasure of both the woman and her partner.

In this particular case, we recommend using VagiYoga, our female personal trainer that will help you tone the muscles of your vagina, offering you the possibility of a quick recovery and preventing all these changes that we are talking about that can occur during pregnancy and postpartum from continuing. time affecting your sexual and couple life.

The second is non-surgical vaginal rejuvenation or laser vaginal tightening, a fairly recent technique that extrapolates the proven benefits of laser light in dermatology to gynecology. The laser when applied to the vaginal mucosa stimulates the production of collagen, elastin and hyaluronic acid, helping to improve vaginal tone with a greater perception of the sensation of the penis in the vagina and greater lubrication of the vaginal canal, significantly improving pleasure sexual.

So if you feel that the kegel exercises have not been enough and you still perceive excessive vaginal flaccidity with decreased perception of your partner's penis inside your vagina, we always suggest you consult your doctor and evaluate this excellent alternative known to many. such as Vaginal Tightening with Laser or also Monalisa Touch®, even today there are vaginal tightening treatments with radiofrequency and ultrasound, all with excellent results in expert hands.

The third procedure does require going through the operating room. It is applied to those women who have a lot of flaccidity or have a certain degree of vaginal and/or rectal prolapse.

During the intervention, the vaginal mucosa and tissue are cut out and then sutured to narrow the vaginal canal with the great benefit that when the gynecologist uses a laser scalpel, recovery is faster than with the traditional technique (without laser). This procedure is recommended after the couple has finished their reproductive life, that is, at the moment they decide that they will not have more children.

At Zenzsual we insist that women should inform their doctor of all aspects related to the changes they experience after their pregnancy. Women should not be self-conscious or feel guilty about wanting to have a satisfactory sexual life, since this aspect is part of their integral health, as established even by the World Health Organization (WHO) which for many years included in its concept of health the psychic and sexual part in order to achieve an integral well-being.

Stay tuned for our next articles where we will be talking to you in greater depth about the tools that you can have at hand to recover your sexuality after childbirth.