My wife Emily and I have six kids, and nine pregnancies between us. So when couples write in asking how to start having sex again after a baby, I am not answering from a textbook. I have been in that house, at that hour, with that level of tired.
Here is the honest version. The reason sex is hard right now is almost never the positions. It is a healing body, a rearranged schedule, and two people running on a fraction of the sleep they used to get. But positions do matter more after a baby than at any other point in a marriage, because the right one removes a specific obstacle: it takes weight off her body, or it hands her control of the depth, or it asks for almost no energy from either of you.
Below are nine sex positions after baby that are worth trying, each chosen for a reason that only applies to this season. Then the practical parts nobody mentions at the six-week appointment.
One thing first: this is about the months after the birth. If you are still pregnant, our guide to sex positions during pregnancy covers that stretch, and it is a genuinely different set of problems.
What Changed, and Why It Changes the Positions
A birth is a major physical event, whether it happened vaginally or by cesarean. Tissue is healing. The pelvic floor has been through something. If there was tearing or an episiotomy or an incision, there is a specific sore place that needs to be kept out of the way. And if your wife is breastfeeding, her estrogen is low, which has a direct and often surprising effect that we will come back to.
That narrows what makes a position good right now to three things:
- She controls the depth. Depth is the single biggest comfort variable in the first months back. A position where she decides how deep is a position she can relax into.
- There is no weight on her middle. An abdomen that is healing, a cesarean incision, or a chest that is sore from nursing all say the same thing: keep the pressure somewhere else.
- It costs almost no energy. Anything that requires holding yourself up, coordinating, or core strength is asking for something neither of you has yet. The best position at 11pm is the one you can do half asleep.
Every position below does at least two of those three.
The Six-Week Clearance Is a Starting Line
Getting cleared by a doctor means the risk of infection and bleeding has passed. It does not mean the body is finished healing, and it certainly does not mean anybody feels ready. Plenty of couples read that appointment as a green light and then feel like something is wrong with them when the first attempt is uncomfortable or joyless.
Nothing is wrong with you. Six weeks is when it becomes safe to begin, not when it becomes good. Expect the first several times back to be an experiment rather than a return to normal, and the whole thing gets much easier.
9 Sex Positions After Baby
Start at the top of this list rather than the bottom. The first few sex positions after baby below ask the least of a healing body, and there is no reason to work up to anything.
1. Spooning
Both of you on your sides, him behind her. This is the one I would start with, and most couples who try it wonder why nobody told them sooner. No weight on her body at all. No core strength required. The angle is naturally shallow, which is exactly what a healing body wants. Neither of you has to hold anything up, and it works in a dark room with a baby monitor going. It is also the easiest position on this list to stop in the middle of, which matters more than it sounds.
2. Side-lying, facing each other
The same low-effort mechanics as spooning, but you can see each other. In a season where you may not have had a full conversation in three days, that is worth something. Her top leg drapes over his. Very little weight on either person, easy to adjust by inches, and simple to pause and talk in without it feeling like the whole thing collapsed.
3. Wife on top
She controls the depth, the angle and the pace, which makes this the most useful position of the whole postpartum stretch. If something is tender, she can steer around it without either of you having to narrate the problem. It also keeps every ounce of weight off a cesarean incision. The trade is that it asks more energy from her, so it is a better fit for a morning than for midnight.
4. Missionary with a pillow, and his weight on his arms
Missionary still works, with two adjustments. Put a pillow under her hips, which changes the angle and supports a lower back that has been carrying a baby for months and is now carrying one on a hip. And he holds his weight on his arms rather than resting on her. Those two changes turn the most familiar position in marriage into one that works again.
5. Edge of the bed
She lies on her back near the edge; he stands or kneels on the floor. Zero weight on her, no energy required from her at all, and she can keep her knees closer together to limit how deep it goes. This is the position for a night when she is willing but running on empty, which in the first year is most nights.
6. Seated, facing each other
He sits in a chair without arms or cross-legged on the bed; she sits facing him in his lap. There is not much thrusting available here, and that is the point. It is built for closeness rather than intensity, chest to chest and able to kiss the whole time. After months of touching a baby all day, a lot of wives find this is the kind of touch they actually want.
7. Lying face down with a pillow under the hips
She lies on her front with a pillow under her hips, legs together. Nothing touches the abdomen, which makes it one of the better options during a cesarean recovery, and keeping her legs together gives her more control over depth than a traditional hands-and-knees position does. Go slower than feels necessary here, because the angle can reach further than either of you expects.
8. Standing, leaning on a dresser
Not romantic on paper. Extremely practical in a house where the baby sleeps in your room. It is quiet, it takes two minutes, most of your clothes stay on, and it does not involve the bed the baby is next to. Sometimes the position that saves your sex life this month is the one that fits in the gap you actually have.
9. Oral and manual
This is on a list of positions deliberately. For a lot of couples, penetration is the last thing to come back comfortably, and treating it as the only thing that counts means going months with nothing at all. Oral and manual stimulation ask nothing of healing tissue, cost far less energy, and keep you connected while the rest catches up. If you want somewhere to start, our guide to helping your wife reach orgasm goes much deeper than we can here.
Use Lubricant. This Is Not the Time to Skip It.
If your wife is breastfeeding, her estrogen levels are low, and low estrogen means vaginal dryness. This is one of the most common experiences after a baby and one of the least discussed, and it catches couples completely off guard, because it has nothing to do with how aroused she is or how much she wants to be there.
Buy lubricant before you need it, and use more of it than you think you need. If dryness is causing pain rather than just friction, that is worth raising with her doctor, because there are treatments for it. Nobody should be quietly enduring painful sex for a year because they assumed it was normal.
If It Hurts, Stop. Do Not Push Through.
Some tenderness the first few times back is expected. Ongoing pain is not, and it is not something to grit your teeth through in order to avoid disappointing anybody.
A pelvic floor physical therapist is the most underused resource in this entire subject. On episode 172, Pauli explained something that stuck with me: scar tissue from childbirth, left unaddressed, can effectively freeze those muscles in place. She described a woman whose youngest child was seven years old and whose pelvic floor still behaved like it was eight weeks postpartum. That is years of avoidable pain.
If sex hurts, say so in the moment and stop. Try again another day with far more lubricant and far slower pacing. And if it keeps hurting, get seen. This is treatable, and treating it early is enormously easier than untangling it later. If the habit of enduring it has already set in, our guide to moving on from duty sex was written for exactly that.
When One of You Is Not Ready Yet
Husbands write to me about this constantly, and I want to say two things to them at once.
The first is that your wife just gave birth. That is an extraordinary thing for a body to do, and it needs time to heal. Between recovery, feeding, and not sleeping, there will be long stretches where sex is genuinely the last thing on her mind, and that is fine. It is not a verdict on your marriage.
The second is the part I said in episode 176 and will keep saying: do not compare your wife to anybody. Some women miss sex badly during recovery and count the days. Others do not think about it for months. Both are normal, and holding your wife up against a woman you read about on the internet will do more damage than the dry spell ever would.
Worth knowing too: a baby rarely creates a problem out of nothing. More often it magnifies one that was already quietly there, which is uncomfortable and also useful, because now you can both see it. If desire has been an issue for longer than this baby has been alive, our guide to low libido in marriage is the better place to start.
The Season Is Temporary. The Habit Is Not.
Keith and Lindsey had four kids in five years, and when they came on episode 197, the thing they kept returning to was not a technique. It was that they had decided early that this part of their marriage mattered, and so when the hardest years arrived, effort in the middle of exhaustion read as love rather than as pressure.
The best sex positions after baby are simply the ones you will actually use at the end of a hard day. Nobody gets points for ambition here.
You are not going to have the sex life you had before the baby, and you are not supposed to yet. What you can do is keep the thread from breaking. Ten minutes. A shower together. One position from this list that does not ask much of either of you. The couples who come out of this season well are not the ones who found the perfect position. They are the ones who kept talking while everything else was hard.
If talking about it is the harder half, start with our pillar on sexual communication in marriage. And when you are both ready to widen the range again, our full guide to sex positions for married couples organizes them by what each one is actually for.
Sex After Baby: Common Questions
Most doctors clear couples at around six weeks, after bleeding has stopped and the risk of infection has passed. That is a starting line rather than a finish line. Being cleared does not mean the body has finished healing or that either of you feels ready, and there is no prize for going first.
The ones that let her control the depth, keep weight off her middle, and ask for very little energy. Spooning, side-lying facing each other, wife on top, and lying at the edge of the bed all do this well. Spooning is usually the gentlest place to start.
Healing tissue, a recovering pelvic floor, scar tissue from tearing or an incision, and low estrogen from breastfeeding are the usual causes. Some tenderness early on is common, but ongoing pain is not something to push through. A pelvic floor physical therapist can help, and the earlier the better.
Yes, and it is very common. Breastfeeding keeps estrogen low, and low estrogen causes dryness. It has nothing to do with how aroused she is or how much she wants to be there. Use plenty of lubricant, and talk to her doctor if it is causing pain rather than just friction.
That is common and it is temporary for most couples. Between recovery, feeding and broken sleep, desire often goes quiet for a while. Keep the connection going in other ways, avoid comparing her to anyone else, and be patient. If low desire predates the baby, it is worth addressing that separately.
Aim for connection rather than performance. Showering together, lying down together for ten minutes, oral or manual touch, and simply talking all keep the thread from breaking. Couples who do well in this season are the ones who kept some form of closeness going, not the ones who kept the same frequency.
Looking for ideas that fit the ten minutes you actually have? The Intimately Us app has conversation starters, bedroom games and over 100 positions, built for married couples.
