I’m single and I’ve never had sex to get pregnant.

I’ve never cuddled up to someone in a post coital glow and said, I wonder if we just created something.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite, I’ve spent all my sexually active years avoiding pregnancy. 

Oh, the Irony. 

I’ve grieved the life not lived, not having a wonderful husband who I could share bringing up kids with and trust me it fricken hurts.

The extra twist, I was thinking about making babies when I had sex though. Yup, it was a total turn on. Not all the time of course, I think of all sorts during sex, fantasy, lists, love, where is that noise coming from, I think I’ve got sand where it shouldn’t be, I want this moment to last forever. But there were times when I thought about how this moment could create a living being and it was absolutely a part of my fantasy.

But I didn’t actually want to get pregnant, not without a partner who I would actually want to have kids with, preferably be married to them and they didn’t expect me to be a stay-at-home mum and we could take the kids of road trips, or even a year of school to hit the road and learn the way of the world, I digress.

My entire sexual life has been sex for pleasure, for fun, for intimacy, for stress release, for love…. But never to make a baby.

Sex drive is personal and differs between people whether they are childless, childfree, parents or grandparents.

I am a pleasure seeker and sex to me is pure pleasure (if you’re lucky enough to find a compatible partner).

Even in my later 30s when I considered IVF on my own my thoughts on sexual intimacy were still on pleasure.

Was it more complex than that? Grieving a life that I wasn’t going to have probably made me a bummer girlfriend at the time, so intimacy was probably crap then anyway.  I’m vague because that period during my late 30s was a blur, I wasn’t aware of what I was grieving so it’s really only a decade later I can unpick it and try to make sense of it. I didn’t have the benefit (ironic also) of being in a relationship with acknowledged childless grief (acknowledged by a partner). I was treading this path all on my own and bloody blindfolded.

So, when I got pregnant the first time, it was a shock, it was scary. I told no one other than a tight knit circle. I wasn’t with the guy I’d been seeing any more for good reason and I certainly didn’t want a lasting reminder of why that was. Plus, I just wasn’t ready, not financially or mentally to take on something like that on my own. 

When I got pregnant the 2nd time, I was so in love with my partner and as happy as I’d ever been. I was scared in the moment of seeing those lines (because it’s a hard habit to break) and my partner already had teenage kids, so this probably wasn’t what he had planned but we had those conversations and enjoyed another level of intimacy and connection I hadn’t realised was possible.

When I miscarried, the grief was shit, I couldn’t disassociate sex from babies. My partner had not been the support I needed during the miscarriage and my swinging emotions in the aftermath. The intimacy was shattered and so was the passion in the bedroom.

Just like that, 3 times a day went to 3 times a month and then once a month.

Because I didn’t feel supported, I didn’t feel intimate and sexual with my partner.

My partner had been in a 25-year marriage where sex was used as a tool to remove as punishment.

My partner completely misunderstood my lack of intimacy, and his part in not nurturing that, so the relationship crumbled. Just like that. Actually, it took 2.5 years of conversations around intimacy and talk that never went anywhere.

Please note, there are lots of parts to a relationship and we had other challenges, but sexual intimacy was a big issue.

So, I return to being a single woman without children.

I haven’t returned to sex yet, but I’m blessed with a great imagination and a couple of vibrating friends who give me joy and no wet spot to roll into.

Anonymous