© Illustration by INJECTION - Alicia Lupieri
I have postcoital dysphoria and I am not alone.
"Share Your Story" submitted by Anonymous, 22 years old from the United Kingdom
Since I had never heard of postcoital dysphoria before it happened to me for the first time, you can imagine how confused I was. I was having really good sex, with a person who I really like, so there was absolutely no reason for the sudden outburst of emotion that hit me right after we were finished. The feeling that I had is really hard to describe, it cannot be compared to regular sadness. It felt like I was falling into a hole of complete darkness.
The weirdest thing about postcoital dysphoria is that you don’t know why you’re so sad all of a sudden. I was just lying there in the dark, tears running down my face and feeling completely empty. After a while, I fell asleep, and the next morning the feeling was completely gone, and thinking back I could not explain to myself what had happened.
After a few days I had already forgotten about it, thinking that it had just been a weird and random mood swing, but after it happened to me again, not once but a few times, I started to talk about it with my friends and did research. One of my friends told me that it had happened to her as well, but the rest were just as confused as me.
After researching on Google, as I always do when something strange happens to me, it turned out that what had happened to me was a phenomenon called post-coital dysphoria (PCD) or "post-sex blues". PCD is the experience of negative affect characterised by tearfulness, a sense of melancholy or depression, anxiety, agitation or aggression following sexual intercourse, according to a science direct article.
Apparently, a lot of women had experienced this phenomenon before, so I wonder why I had never heard of it by now. A 2015 study shared that 46 percent of the women who had participated in the study had experienced PCD at least once, which is almost half. I think the problem is, as with many other aspects of female sexuality, that no one talks about it. That is why I wanted to share my story with everyone today, in order to let you know that you are not alone or weird if something like this happens to you and to encourage you to talk about your sexuality openly. There is never anything to be ashamed of, and if we share our experience, we might notice that there is always someone who can relate.