The stitches have healed, breastfeeding is finished, the child has even managed to go and adapt to kindergarten, but sex life has not been restored. Such stories are not uncommon, and cooling can begin on both sides. Today is about men. Or rather, about where and why their libido leaves the marriage soon after the birth of a child. At first, their partner in bed games is called “my girlfriend.” Kate. Masha. Darling. Girlfriend. A woman. And then... rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr - and this girl suddenly turns into a mother. A man already has one mother - his own, and she is, of course, anyone, but not a sexual object. What do other mothers look like in our culture? What comes to your mind? You can remember the Motherland. Brrr... This sculpture is clearly not about sex, unless, of course, we are talking about perversions. She is calling me somewhere, and I clearly don’t want to go there. This is not about love and desire, but about duty, including marital duty. It stands somewhere between the debt for utilities and the urgent request of the wife to buy diapers and toilet paper on the way home. But it’s one thing to have sex of one’s own free will, and quite another out of a sense of duty. The outstretched hand of the motherland is not something you should follow me, which could be enjoyed before the birth of the child. The second mother known to everyone is, of course, the Virgin Mary. Compressed thin lips, exhausted eyes, either reproaching or begging for help. In the Orthodox tradition, motherhood is generally associated with feat and asceticism. Is sex with this woman possible? Of course not! Compare the icon of the Mother of God, for example, Vladimir, with any image of the Catholic Madonna and Child. The Italian Madonna (which, by the way, translates as “my lady”, “my woman”) is primarily a sensual image. Yes, she gave birth to a child, but this does not prevent her from looking feminine and very seductive. The Italian “mama” is a hymn to sensual beauty, a song about a flower whose bud has blossomed to enjoy life in all its fullness. But as for the “mothers” rooted in the consciousness of a Russian man, there can be no talk of any kind of life here . Sheer duty, camaraderie and brotherhood. So it turns out that turning a beloved woman into a “mother” often makes a marriage asexual. It turns the blissful union of lovers into a party cell carrying out a reproduction plan, or into a temple where not only is it forbidden to have sex, but it is advisable to speak in a low voice. Such a time bomb is embedded in the subconscious of many men who grew up in the Soviet and post-Soviet space. Now that the mechanisms have been declassified, we need to think about how to neutralize this bomb before it undermines the marriage. To be continued in my next articles, as well as in the “School of Mothers” classes, which I conduct in the antenatal clinics of Maternity Hospital No. 1 in Nizhny Novgorod.