First things first, if you are hoping that this will be some racy, graphic blog post, you’re out of luck. This post will be PG-13. At best. I have close friends and family that read this blog, and I don’t want their brains to combust. Or for them to never be able to look at me the same way again. That being said, I would like to start off with a story:
I remember a friend in college once sharing with me that her parents were intimate every Friday night. I was horrified when I heard this for many reasons:
- That my friend knew this and no one ever wants to think about their own parents having sexual intercourse
- That I now knew this about her parents
- That it made me recall the time I walked in on my own parents (and I am still struggling to erase that memory from my brain)
- And how boring and routinized the whole thing sounded, kind of like scheduling regular cleanings at the dentist.
However, now as a married adult and a mother, I understand how easy it is to become like my friend’s parents and to fall into this type of trap. We tend to live busy lives. We might work different shifts than our partner or be on radically different schedules. And often times, it is out of our deep desire to make intimacy a priority that it somehow becomes regulated. We want to make sure it happens, so it gets penciled in.
Not to mention the fact that if we were deliberately trying to conceive in the not so distant past, our intimacy has probably been even more calculated! There are charts and windows and tests. Suddenly, routine dental cleanings might sound more spontaneous and exciting than being with our spouse!
I say all of this, because when I share with others that my husband and I bed-share with our daughter, one of the first questions that I am often asked is whether or not we are able to still be intimate with each other.
The short answer is yes, absolutely. (And no, don’t panic! We are never that way with our daughter in the same room.)
But the longer answer is to the question is yes, we are still intimate. But that bed-sharing has actually caused that part of our marriage to be even better!
When our daughter was first born, she slept all the time. So we would often let her sleep on our chests or in a Moby wrap 
J likes to be nursed to sleep, so I would lay next to her in our bed and nurse her down. But that left us with a baby in our bed for the next twelve hours. For the first couple of months, we would try each night to move her from our bed to our crib. We called it “transplanting,” but it always seemed to fail. J would wake up, we’d have to carry her back to our bedroom and start all over again. And yes, I also tried holding her in my arms and nursing her to sleep that way, but she wouldn’t have any of it. So we eventually came to accept the fact that if our bed was going to constantly occupied, and that we were wanting to be intimate, we would have to find someplace else.
And it is this very complication that has suddenly made everything a lot more exciting. It’s because we are forced to think outside the box. We never know how long we have before we’ll hear a rustle on the baby monitor and have to go check on her. Or what we will be doing or what place will suddenly become convenient. That’s makes it spontaneous and interesting. If you are currently bed-sharing and are hoping to get some help in the intimacy department, I do have some suggestions of places. But again, I don’t want to get too graphic here. But let’s just say, that the only thing in your way is your own imagination.
All that being said, I recognize that bed-sharing is not for everyone, nor should it be. There are a lot of rules and precautions to follow in order to make sure that it is done safely. But if your sole objection is that it will stifle your love life, then you should probably think again. The reality is that it might just liberate it.
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