Sex advice with Suzi Godson: Pregnancy can be the best and worst of times

I’m newly pregnant and my libido has been very up and down. I’m aware that I won’t be able to have sex for a while after the birth. What will happen to my libido during my pregnancy and is there anything I can do? I don’t want to lose the sexual closeness that I have with my husband.

Pregnancy. It can be the best of times and the worst of times. The body that you have so reliably inhabited for decades suddenly becomes an alien. Your hormones board a rollercoaster, taking your libido with them, and for the next nine months, they skyrocket, loop the loop and crash back down with no regard whatsoever for the impact that they are having on you, or your relationship. Self-confidence can take a huge hit too, as your body changes. Yet on the plus side, being pregnant is the most incredible experience.

Although no two pregnancies are identical, seven billion babies and counting means that we can now predict, with a reasonable degree of certainty, what will happen to you, and your libido, throughout the 40 weeks of pregnancy. During the first trimester, your levels of oestrogen and progesterone increase dramatically. These months can be blighted by tiredness, nausea, and painful breasts, and, as a result, the activity that got you pregnant in the first place is often out of the question. Other women find that increased blood flow to the pelvis and the genitals leave them in an almost perpetual state of arousal. Women normally have about 100ml of blood per minute flowing through the uterine artery. In the first six weeks of pregnancy this increases to about 120ml per minute and by the end of the final trimester it increases to a whopping 350ml per minute.