When Peanut — a Tinder-like app for millennial mums — looked through the conversations on its forums feature, the company was surprised to find that its users weren't just talking about breastfeeding, birthing techniques, and sleep training. Sex was one of the most popular ongoing convos.
The exchanges Peanut was seeing led the company to conduct a survey of more than 1,000 women (not just Peanut users) between the ages of 22-37, which found that postpartum mums wanted sex — a lot. And sometimes, this even led them to have sex with their babies in the room. About 45% of the mums surveyed said they have had sex with their baby (under one years old) in the room. Maybe that sounds unorthodox to some, but if you’re a new parent, you know time is precious and uninterrupted opportunities to get frisky are rare.
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Learning that so many mums have had sex while their baby was in the room wasn't shocking to Michelle Kennedy, Peanut's CEO, because she's been a new mum, too. Lots of mums are doing it, she says, but they might not be telling their friends because having sex with your baby sleeping in the crib next to you feels taboo. But as new parents are often exhausted and rarely have time away from their babies, where else are they supposed to do it?
Sure, they could hire a babysitter for the night or forgo sex altogether, but mums don't want to do that. About 61% of the mums surveyed said they want to have more sex than they're currently having, and they're already having sex relatively frequently. About 19% of mums said they had sex more than three times a week, 29% said two to three times a week, and nearly 26% said one time a week.
Lack of time and recovering physically and emotionally from birth can definitely decrease a woman's sex drive. But for a lot of new mums, once they're given the green light by their physicians to resume sexual activity, they want it just as much as before they got pregnant.
So what if they happen to be in the same room as their new baby?