This post was contributed by Kiana Reeves.
For over a decade Kiana has been working at the intersection of sex, embodiment, intimacy, pleasure, birth, and wellbeing.
Her work is a holistic & somatic approach to the emotional, biological, personal, ancestral, and spiritual nature of sex & intimacy.
She is a Certified Somatic Sex Educator & Sexological Bodyworker, Certified Embodiment and Intimacy Teacher, Certified STREAM Pelvic Health Practitioner, Full Spectrum Doula, and Mother of two delightful and wild humans.
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Pregnancy can be a wildly different experience in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd trimesters—and with each child you have. The journey is personal, dynamic, and unpredictable, with no two pregnancies alike. When it comes to intimacy and sex during pregnancy, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to navigating the changes you’re experiencing.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the most common shifts you may encounter and, more importantly, share key practices and insights to help you stay connected to your sensuality and your partner—no matter where you are in your pregnancy journey.
Enjoy Your Changing Body
Maybe your pregnancy is filled with rest, ease, and that famous inner glow. Or perhaps it’s been a journey of nausea, exhaustion, and feeling anything but sensual. One may feel more comfortable than the other, but in either case, tuning into experiences that make your body feel good is a practice that will nourish and ground you while helping you feel resourced. This practice also prepares you for birth.
Finding and focusing on positive sensations—those physical feelings that bring comfort or pleasure—sends a powerful message to your body: You are safe. This is especially vital during labor, where intensity can overwhelm. I’ll never forget when my midwife, during the apex of pain in my second birth, asked my son’s father to kiss me. In that moment, my inner doula voice (I’ve been a practicing doula for over 15 years) recognized how feel-good sensations help the body stay calm amid discomfort.
Your practice of tuning into what feels good can start with curiosity. Ask your body, “What would feel good right now?” Maybe it’s lying in the sun, taking a bath, dancing in your pajamas, or eating something that sparks joy. Small moments of enjoyment, built cumulatively, keep you in touch with your body’s sensual side.
Sensuality is simply attuning to your senses in a way that brings pleasure. Tune into scents, sights, sounds, tastes, and touch in ways you genuinely enjoy. When you practice this regularly, you remember your body loves to feel good, creating space for connection and intimacy through the senses.
Explore Pleasurable Touch
One of the key measures of satisfying sexual intimacy is pleasure. Sometimes when we’ve been in a long-term relationship, habit takes the place of exploration, especially in the realms of sex. We assume what our partner likes, and our partner assumes what we like, and things can become fairly routine.
During pregnancy our body changes so much, sex can become uncomfortable in certain familiar positions, and your libido might be changing too. For that reason, pregnancy is an opportune time to reassess how to approach sex together. To ask the questions, “What do you actually want?” “Where do you want to be touched?” and “How can I make you feel so good?”. With these questions, we begin to center pleasurable touch as the exploration. Instead of leading our partnered or solo sexual experiences from habit, we explore them by becoming curious and touching each other in new ways.
You might start to focus on different parts of each other's body, or you might notice that a part of your body that used to enjoy a certain touch really wants something different now. This is true during pregnancy and will likely continue through postpartum. So, checking in with each other, being vocal about your needs, and being playfully curious will take you very far!
Take Goal Oriented Sex Off the Table
Goal oriented sex is sex that is linear with a clear end goal, usually the goal is one or both partners reaching climax. When you’re pregnant the goals posts change. Your body changes, your emotions change, how you want to be touched changes, and it’s a perfect time to reassess how you approach sex.
Linear sex is often described to me by my clients as predictable. The kind of sex that starts with kissing, then some hands, then a little oral, and then often penetration (especially if you’re in a hetero relationship). The thing is goal oriented linear sex isn’t that interesting, and during pregnancy as our needs change it provides us an opportunity to really change things up.
So how do you take goals off the table? First talk to your partner about it. You can say something like, “I'm noticing my body is really craving something different. I would love to have sex in a way that isn’t about either one of us getting off, and focuses more on exploring what feels good in the moment”. That might look like slowing down, checking in more often verbally about what feels good, longer and more exploratory foreplay sessions, and it might even look like taking penetrative sex off the table for a while - if that starts to feel uncomfortable. When our intention is connection and pleasure, instead of climax, a whole world of intimacy and ways of experiencing sexual pleasure open up.
Explore Positions that Feel Good
Positions that feel good during pregnancy aren’t always the positions we’re used to enjoying in our non-pregnant state. Laying on your back might start to be difficult, and certain positions just stop feeling good or being accessible in the 3rd trimester. If you’re looking for ones to try that can be supportive of your changing body, seated positions can be a great option.
You can try seated positions facing each other or leaning your back against your partner’s chest. Another great position to explore is laying side by side spooning, you can use a supportive body pillow to hold against the front of your body for extra support. Remember, sex should always feel good.
If there is pain, discomfort, or you need to adjust to feel more comfortable - please do! Too often women end up enduring sexual discomfort because they want their partner to have a good experience. Trust me when I say, your partner wants you to have the best experience possible too - so ask for what you need.
Work with Your Libido
A very common change some people experience during pregnancy is changes in their libido. Sometimes pregnancy hormones can turn our libidos on full blast, and for some our libidos feel like they have disappeared, and we wonder if they will ever come back. If you don’t feel like being touched - that's ok. If you’re craving sex like crazy - that’s also ok. If you’ve fluctuated between the two, just know all of this is normal.
Try not to make any part of the experience you’re having need to change. Trust that as your body goes through this process and gets the rest, nourishment, and care it needs - everything will even out again. If you’re feeling like you want to work with your libido, which essentially is your sexual desire. You can try accessing your desire through your senses.
This is called responsive desire. Most of us are familiar with the concept of spontaneous desire, which is where desire arises in the mind first and then the body follows. Responsive desire arises through the body - and is activated through experiences like loving touch, a sexy word whispered in your ear, watching something that stirs your sensual appetite like a sexy movie scene. Responsive desire is desire that we get to cultivate within our own body on our own time. You can share with your partner details about what helps you get turned on, and it will invite them into your process so that they can support you in feeling sexually fulfilled.
Sexual connection in relationships can be challenging to navigate even outside of pregnancy. Add in new hormones, a changing body, and the complexities of pregnancy, and it’s natural to feel like a lot is shifting. My hope is that the ideas in this article help take the pressure off if things feel different in your relationship when it comes to sex. Change during this time is completely normal. By navigating it together with compassion and open communication, you can create space for deeper, more fulfilling intimacy as you explore the evolving erotic landscape of your relationship.
