The standard advice is six weeks, and it’s close to meaningless. Six weeks is when tissue has healed enough for penetration to be medically reasonable. It says nothing about desire, comfort, sleep, or how either person feels about a body that has just done something enormous.
What’s genuinely common
Desire being absent for months. Longer while breastfeeding, for a specific physiological reason: prolactin is elevated and oestrogen suppressed, which reduces desire and thins tissue. That’s hormonal rather than psychological, and knowing it stops it being read as a verdict on the relationship.
Dryness, for the same reason. Frequently substantial, frequently mistaken for lack of arousal, and easily addressed with lubricant — which isn’t an admission of anything.
Exhaustion that makes desire close to irrelevant. Feeling touched-out, which is a real phenomenon and one of the most under-discussed: a person who has been physically handled all day by a small human frequently has no capacity left for being touched at all, and it isn’t about the partner.
And a changed relationship to a body that’s now also functional in a way it wasn’t.
What isn’t just normal
This is the important half, because a great deal gets waved through.
Ongoing pain. Not normal at six months. Causes include scar tissue from tearing or episiotomy, pelvic floor dysfunction, and hormonal thinning — all treatable. Take it to a doctor and ask for pelvic floor assessment by name.
Incontinence. Extremely common and not something to live with. Pelvic floor physical therapy has strong outcomes, and in some countries it’s standard postnatal care and in others you’ve to ask.
Prolapse symptoms — heaviness, dragging, a sense of something descending. Treatable, and frequently unmentioned out of embarrassment.
Persistent low mood, anxiety, or intrusive thoughts. Perinatal depression and anxiety are common and treatable, and intrusive thoughts about harm coming to the baby are a symptom rather than a risk — see postpartum OCD. Both are frequently missed because everyone assumes exhaustion explains everything.
The partner side
Less discussed and real. Partners frequently report feeling displaced, or afraid of causing pain, or guilty for wanting anything, or excluded from a bond that formed without them.
Non-birthing partners also experience perinatal depression at meaningful rates and are almost never screened.
What helps
Separate touch from sex, deliberately. The pattern where all contact becomes a bid forms fast in this period, and it’s the thing that does long-term damage. The agreement is here.
Assume responsive rather than spontaneous desire for a while. Waiting to feel like it’s waiting for something that isn’t coming during a period of this much depletion. More here.
Address the load, not the libido. The most effective intervention for desire in the first two years is frequently sleep and a fairer division of domestic and mental labour, which is unromantic and reliably true.
And lower the bar. Fifteen minutes of being close, without an outcome, is worth considerably more at this stage than waiting for an evening that isn’t going to arrive.