“I love my wife, and our sex life was great before we had a child. Since she gave birth, I can no longer see her sexually. I still find her beautiful, but in my mind she is now, above all, the mother of our child. Yet my libido has not disappeared. I am attracted to other women and have cheated on her several times, which makes me feel awful. I do not want to lead a double life or lose my marriage, but it feels as though I cannot bring together, in the same person, the mother of my child and the woman I desire sexually. Why has this happened to me, and can I change it?”

Petra's answer

Dear Ivan,

the most important part of your question is this: “It feels as though I cannot bring together the mother of my child and the woman I desire sexually.” That is where I would look for answers, because your sexual desire clearly exists, but something has changed in the way you see your wife since she became a mother.

We like to think that sexual desire is rational. We look at someone, decide whether we find them attractive and, by that logic, our body should obediently take care of the rest. If sexuality worked that way, my job would be considerably simpler. But sexual desire is connected to a whole range of associations, experiences and meanings we have attached throughout our lives to sexuality, relationships, men, women, the body, love, safety, prohibition, shame… Sometimes an internal split develops along the way.

Psychological and psychoanalytic literature describes a pattern often called the Madonna-whore split or Madonna-whore complex. This is not a diagnosis that can be made on the basis of a few sentences, nor am I claiming that this is your situation. But the concept is interesting because it describes the difficulty some men have in bringing together deep respect, tenderness and attachment with strong sexual desire for the same woman. One category is “the woman I love, respect and build a family with”, and the other is “the woman I desire sexually”.

Subtle messages

Where does such a pattern come from? There does not have to be any major traumatic event. Sometimes, as we grow up, we absorb very subtle messages about what a “good woman” is like, what a mother is like, what a woman suited to marriage is like and what women “for sex” are like.

These messages are often absorbed without anyone explicitly teaching them. It can be enough to hear how women are talked about in the family, watch your own parents’ relationship, hear comments about girls who openly express their sexuality or about characters in films, and grow up with the idea that motherhood, chastity and respect belong on one side, while lust and sexual freedom belong on the other.

Today, a person may consciously think that they do not believe in any of that nonsense. And that is probably true. But our automatic emotional and sexual patterns do not always follow the rules we consciously stand by today. That is precisely why, when working with deeply rooted patterns, it is not enough to focus on what a person thinks today. I am much more interested in what they have learned throughout their life to associate with love, sex, motherhood, lust, fidelity, “good” women and “bad” women.

This is one of the reasons I also use hypnotherapy. Not as a magic trick that lets us pull a single scene out of the subconscious and, with dramatic music playing, conclude: “Aha! It’s all Mum’s fault.” It is not that simple. I find hypnotherapy interesting because it allows us to work with automatic associations, emotional reactions and beliefs that a person often understands very well on a rational level, yet still cannot change simply by talking about them.

You describe something similar. Rationally, you know that you love her, that you find her beautiful, that you want to preserve your marriage and desire your wife again. Yet your sexual response seems to contradict that: she is the mother of your child, and it simply does not work. This mismatch between what a person wants and what automatically happens to them is a sign that it is worth looking more deeply into what is going on.

Inner conflict

Cheating is certainly not therapy for this problem. I understand why you find other women sexually attractive. For you, they do not carry the meaning your wife has acquired. They are not the mothers of your child. With them, perhaps you can give yourself over to the sexual part of yourself without inner conflict. But having an explanation does not mean there is no responsibility. You are responsible for cheating on your wife. And if you continue, you could very easily destroy the relationship you have without ever resolving what is actually happening inside you. You could change partners and repeat the whole vicious circle if you have a child with another woman. If the problem lies in the pattern, it travels with you.

Can this change? It is something you can work on. I would say it is worth trying, because you love your wife, you want your marriage and you are troubled by what is happening to you. So the first step is not to try to turn your wife back into the woman she was before pregnancy. She is no longer the same woman she was before pregnancy: she has become a mother, but that has not stopped her from being a woman or a sexual being.

Your task is not to erase the mother from the picture, but to understand why motherhood, specifically, has pushed eroticism aside in the way you see her. A woman can be the mother of your child, someone you deeply love and respect, and a woman you want to take to the bedroom. Those roles do not cancel one another out. If your inner system currently sees them as incompatible, it is far more useful to explore how that pattern developed than to try to force yourself to feel desire.

Old patterns

I do not expect someone to come home after one hypnotherapy session, see his wife folding children’s socks and tear off her clothes in a surge of passion. But even deeply rooted patterns are not set in stone. When working with them, the aim is not to convince yourself that you “should” feel something, but to understand what stands between you and the feelings you want to have again, and to begin changing the automatic associations that lead you in the opposite direction.

While you are trying to understand this, stop looking for the answer in other women. Each new act of infidelity may briefly reassure you that your sexual desire has not disappeared, but at the same time it increases the distance between you and your wife and creates a new problem that, if she finds out, may be much harder than the one you started with.

You have taken an important first step by recognising very precisely what is happening. Now you do not need to find a way to stop seeing your wife as a mother, but to discover why, since she became a mother, you have stopped seeing her as a woman. Only once you find the answer to that question can the work of restoring what you have lost begin.