The Real Deal About Sex After Kids

"What do you plan to do for birth control?" my midwife asked. It was my six-week postpartum checkup, and she had just pronounced that it was safe for me to have sex.

"Birth control?" I said, like she was speaking a foreign language. I was hormonal and emotionally fragile after a difficult birth, and now I was nursing a newborn. I was thinking about having sex again the same way I was planning to lose my baby weight — sometime in the future, but certainly not right now. "There's a pill that's safe to take when you're breast-feeding," she told me, and scribbled down the name. I stuck it in my wallet, just like I once took guys' numbers knowing I'd never call.

In part because I felt like we were supposed to get back in the saddle, my husband and I tried having sex a few days later (with a condom). Even though I'd had a C-section, intercourse was surprisingly painful and, despite the two glasses of mood-setting chardonnay I drank beforehand, not at all romantic. After 15 minutes we decided to give up, and it was another few weeks before I was ready to go all the way again. Parenthood (which is, uh, caused by sex) often leads to a sexual drought that seems strangely taboo for women to talk about. Pain, lack of desire... I've noticed that friends clam up about it all, even after being totally open about every TMI detail of pregnancy. No one has written What to Expect When You're No Longer Expecting But Your Husband Expects to Have Sex and the Sex Isn't What You Were Expecting. Yet we're all familiar with some of the reasons babies make sex a challenge: the exhaustion, the limited time, the stress. Plus, kids have a way of taking over every space they're in. It's hard to get in the mood when I roll over in bed onto a ZhuZhu Pet.

Sex did get better for my husband and me, bit by bit, and I was relieved to find that the pain was temporary. We did it during our daughter's afternoon naps at first, blessed with a good sleeper. When she dropped the nap, we would sneak in ultra-quickies while she played happily down the hall. (My husband and I are self-employed, which helped.) The biggest change over the past five years — our daughter is in kindergarten now — is that sex is almost always planned. I used to be bothered by that until I realized that these "dates" ensure that our sex life keeps going.

The Pregnancy Crazies: The Condition Men Get When Their Wife is Pregnan Read more: Dads and Pregnancy - Helping Husbands Cope When Their Wife is preg

It's true that during pregnancy, women experience hormones, stretch marks, and a million other things men will never understand. But let me explain something men go through. I call them the Pregnancy Crazies — erratic impulses brought on by the uncomfortable realization that life is about to change in mysterious and potentially smelly, screamy ways.

The Pregnancy Crazies come in many forms and varying degrees of severity. Maybe your judgment gets wonky and you start smoking again at the very moment when you need to shore up your long-term health. Maybe you take a sledgehammer to your bathroom 10 days before the due date, convinced that it must be renovated and that you are just the man for the job. Hopefully you don't pull a Weiner and start sexting pictures of your junk to random women just when you should be most committed to your wife.

I know too many guys who tried to recapture the adventurous spirit of their youth after learning their wives were pregnant and wound up having extreme-sports-related accidents. Apparently, men should avoid skateboards, mountain bikes, and rollerblades during the first trimester.

Other husbands' symptoms manifest themselves in a more cerebral — i.e., gone mental — fashion. My friend Chris, now a father of three, couldn't believe that his wife was pregnant the first time. She showed him the test. She danced and sang. She jumped up and down. No dice. "We'd been trying for so long that I just couldn't bring myself to believe it was real," he says. Luckily, that only lasted a week. Any lingering doubt disappeared the moment the doctors told Chris and his wife they were having twins.

When my friend Randy found out his wife was pregnant, he stopped having sex with her immediately, and held out the entire nine months. "I couldn't do it. You worry about hitting something you're not supposed to," he tells me. "I also worried that it would somehow shape my kids' future personalities and subconsciously give them weird ideas about sex when they got older."

If you and your guy are done having kids, the vasectomy is the least invasive, most effective form of permanent birth control. Intrepid reporter (and snip-ee) Mike Zimmerman digs up everything you both need to know about the procedure — so you can talk him into it.

Nearly every couple who's finished having children will eventually sit down to have "the talk" about permanent contraception. But the conversation will never go like this:

WOMAN: "Honey, I think you should have a vasectomy. It's simple, safe, and it'll make sex so much better for us."

MAN: "Sweetheart, you're absolutely right."

TOGETHER: "Let's make the appointment!"

Agreeing that you're done having kids is usually far easier than agreeing on who signs up for sterilization. But the choice between your tubes being tied and his getting snipped should be no biggie if you base it on statistical logic: "Vasectomy is by far the most effective form of permanent contraception," says Marc Goldstein, M.D., professor and surgeon-in-chief of male reproduction at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, who's performed more than 3,000 vasectomies himself. "It's 10 times more effective than a woman tying her tubes. Also, every year 25 to 30 women die during a tubal ligation procedure because of complications from anesthesia or injury to the blood vessels or bowel. Zero men die from vasectomy."

But for some guys (maybe one you know?), those reasons will not matter. It turns out that volunteering to be neutered is pretty high on the list of Things Ye Dare Not Do as recorded in the Secret Scrolls of Manhood. So why am I, a man, writing this story? I had a vasectomy myself (you can read all about it in a few short paragraphs), and the snip has done great things for my marriage and my sex life. Read this guide, show it to your guy, and decide for yourselves.

WHY MEN BALK AT VASECTOMIES

"I would really like my husband to get one, but after lots of discussion, he continues to say no to vasectomy," says Heather, 37. "I'm terrible at remembering to take the Pill. It would be much easier for him to snip-snip. But no matter what logical argument I make, what wins out is the stigma of someone messing with his 'junk.'"

There you have one of the main reasons many guys are hesitant: "We spend our entire lives protecting our testes," says Wayne Weissman, M.D., cofounder of the Vasectomy Center in Seattle, who has performed 7,500 vasectomies. "Women have their gonads inside their abdomens! Men walk around with their sack exposed, and it's incredibly sensitive, so they feel more protective. Then, suddenly, you're supposed to spread your legs in a doctor's office. It's not intuitive for men."

The Stripper's Secret

Unlike their sisters in the animal kingdom, human females don't openly advertise their ovulation. But even without a human version of the baboon's bright pink behind, signs of fertility sneak out, according to several studies. Subconsciously, women dress more provocatively and men find them prettier when it's prime time for conception. And a report from the University of New Mexico demonstrates that the cyclic signs have economic consequences.

Psychologist Geoffrey Miller and colleagues tapped the talent at local gentlemen's clubs and counted tips made on lap dances. Dancers made about $70 an hour during their peak period of fertility, versus about $35 while menstruating and $50 in between.

Miller links the wage fluctuations to changes in body odor, waist-to-hip ratio, and facial features. Despite operating at the upper limits of flirtatiousness already, he says there may also be subtle shifts in their behavior—"how they talk and move when enticing a customer to buy a dance, and how they perform the dance itself."

Women on the pill averaged $37 (and had no performance peak) versus $53 for women off-pill. The contraceptive produces hormonal cues indicating early not an enticing target for a would-be suitor. Birth control could lead to many thousands of dollars lost every year.

The Truth About Married Crushes

If you pinch your cheeks when the cute UPS guy arrives, your secret is safe with us — and you don't need to feel guilty. "Being attracted to other people after you're taken is normal," says Andrea Syrtash, an advice columnist and author of the new book "Women assume it means something is wrong at home, but I'm happily married and I've had crushes on everyone from the guy who checks me out at the grocery store to coworkers. It's fleeting and fun. We're social animals and need to connect with people." In fact, if you bring home the rush you get from flirty exchanges, your connection with your partner can actually benefit from it. "When you have a crush, it reminds you that you're a sensual, sexy woman, and every one of us needs that," she says. "It can inspire you to channel that energy into your own marriage and flirt with your husband as well." All that said, if a crush turns truly lustful or consumes your thoughts, it's time to back off. "It's normal to fantasize, but you'll know you're crossing the loyalty line if you start to conceal your interactions with your crush," says Syrtash. That may be a signal that your relationship at home needs some special attention.

The Truth About Beauty

It would be so nice if inner beauty triumphed over outer appearance. But men are designed to care about packaging. It's time to accept the not-so-pretty facts about looks.

There are certain practical realities of existence that most of us accept. If you want to catch a bear, you don't load the trap with a copy of Catch-22—not unless you rub it with a considerable quantity of raw hamburger. If you want to snag a fish, you can't just slap the water with your hand and yell, "Jump on my hook, already!" Yet, if you're a woman who wants to land a man, there's this notion that you should be able to go around looking like Ernest Borgnine: If you're "beautiful on the inside," that's all that should count. Right. And I should have a flying car and a mansion in Bel Air with servants and a moat.

Welcome to Uglytopia—the world reimagined as a place where it's the content of a woman's character, not her pushup bra, that puts her on the cover of Maxim. It just doesn't seem fair to us that some people come into life with certain advantages—whether it's a movie star chin or a multimillion-dollar shipbuilding inheritance. Maybe we need affirmative action for ugly people; make George Clooney rotate in some homely women between all his gorgeous girlfriends. While we wish things were different, we'd best accept the ugly reality: No man will turn his head to ogle a woman because she looks like the type to buy a turkey sandwich for a homeless man or read to the blind.

Scents and Sensibility

"Sexual chemistry" is more than just a way of talking about heated attraction. Subtle chemical keys actually help determine who we fall for. But here comes news that our lifestyles may unwittingly undermine our natural sex appeal.

Psychologists Rachel Herz and Estelle Campenni were just getting to know each other, swapping stories about their lives over coffee, when Campenni confided something unexpected: She was living proof, she said, of love at first smell. "I knew I would marry my husband the minute I smelled him," she told Herz. "I've always been into smell, but this was different; he really smelled good to me. His me feel safe and at the same time turned on—and I'm talking about his real body smell, not cologne or soap. I'd never felt like that from a man's smell before. We've been married for eight years now and have three kids, and his smell is always very sexy to me."