Louise Thompson has opened up about how pregnancy impacted her relationship with her partner Ryan Libbey.
The former Made In Chelsea star, 35, nearly died while giving birth to her son Leo and spent a month in intensive care with ‘serious complications’ followed by years in and out of hospital, before going on to suffer a devastating miscarriage.
Now, Louise has opened up about how her and Ryan navigated their relationship ahead of her traumatic birth.
Speaking on the RISE with Roxie Nafousi podcast on Monday, Louise admitted that she felt ‘unattractive’ during the pregnancy and became disconnected from Ryan as she ‘didn’t want to be intimate with him’.
She also said her identity before the pregnancy was entirely focused on health and fitness – but once pregnant her energy was completely drained and she felt like she could no longer keep up with Ryan, which created distance.
Louise said: ‘It took a chunk out of our relationship and then we weren’t intimate at all. I didn’t want to be intimate with him.
Louise Thompson has opened up about how pregnancy impacted her relationship with her partner Ryan Libbey on the RISE with Roxie Nafousi podcast on Monday
Now, Louise has opened up about how her and Ryan navigated their relationship ahead of her traumatic birth
‘I don’t think he really wants to be intimate with me in that third trimester. And I didn’t overthink it at the time, but I think that probably fed into some of me not feeling so good.’
She continued: ‘Ryan and I, we kind of grew kind of disconnected through the pregnancy, especially from sort of the middle to the end.
‘I felt as though there was just no room to carry this baby. So I felt particularly unattractive. And also with my identity being focused around the whole fitness thing, having gone from working out every single day and feeling really good, I mean I felt so well. I could have long days. I’d wake up at five, I’d go to bed at 10, 11, and I was just a ball of energy.
‘That energy was depleted so quickly. I couldn’t jump anymore. I used to jump to do loads of cardio and I just couldn’t move.
‘And so I felt like I was quite disconnected from Ryan, who I’d forged a big fitness relationship with, but also from the community that we’d built up. We had this whole fitness business. I couldn’t really host in the same way that I wanted to do that.’
Speaking about the fall out from her traumatic birth, Louise admitted that her, Ryan and their son struggled to connect.
She said: ‘We weren’t really a family. I don’t think we had a single nice family moment. I wouldn’t call it a family. I don’t know what it was.
‘It was three people, three babies that weren’t really able to do anything for themselves or one another. We were not in a good spot because I was so like, virtually just out of it and in my own head.’
The former Made In Chelsea star, 35, nearly died while giving birth to her son Leo and spent a month in intensive care with ‘serious complications’ (Louise, Leo and Ryan pictured)
Speaking on the RISE with Roxie Nafousi podcast on Monday, Louise admitted that she felt ‘unattractive’ during the pregnancy
She also said her identity before the pregnancy was entirely focused on health and fitness – but once pregnant her energy was completely drained
Speaking about how she navigated her first year of motherhood, Louise continued: ‘We didn’t have a routine. I think Ryan tried to have a routine with Leo, our son.
‘I was only really holding him for like a minute at time at that stage. But my routine was medical appointments. So that was the thing I was holding onto.
‘So I had basically booked in, either I had NHS or private appointments every single day. And if I look, because actually there was, there’s like, you my calendar, if I look back, was just mental health appointments to get through to the next day.
‘And it was the crisis team, I guess, that were the best ones to lend the support to bridge the gap until I could start thinking a bit more normally.’
It comes after Louise broke down in tears over fears her son Leo was lonely without siblings after she, despite wanting to grow her family, vowed ‘never to carry another child’.
Speaking on her He Said She Said podcast with fiancé Ryan Libbey, Louise cried after after seeing Leo, three, speaking to what she assumed was an imaginary friend.
Tearfully recalling the moment she said: ‘Leo was on his bike perched up against a wall, and he was talking to himself as if he had an imaginary friend, and it made me fall in love with him so much,’
Louise broke down in tears over fears her son Leo was lonely without siblings after she, despite wanting to grow her family, vowed ‘never to carry another child’
‘But equally and probably one of the reasons why it’s jerking tears is because, I guess a second I thought “oh god is this because he doesn’t have any siblings?”.
As Ryan attempted to reassure an emotional Louise, she revealed fearing as a first time mum worrying that Leo’s behaviour was ‘abnormal’ before a fan got in touch to tell her a child having an imaginary friend was a ‘sign of intelligence’.
Sharing a clip of Leo speaking to himself on TikTok she wrote: ‘One of my followers messages me to say that having an imaginary friend at a young age is a sign of intelligence;.
‘That was really kind of her because an an anxious first time mum navigating this whole world as each milestone passes I worried that it was because we haven’t been able to give Leo a sibling yet’.
