How Having a Baby Changed My Marriage

Photo by Offset

When my husband and I brought our daughter home from the hospital, we walked in the door, carseat in hand, looked at each other, and shrugged.

“Where should we put her?” Matt asked me.

“Well, I’m hungry,” I said. “So…the kitchen?”

Thus began our new relationship — it wasn’t just us anymore. We had a little life to look out for, too. And this seemed like an exciting new phase in our marriage.  This person — part me, part him — was ours to hopefully not screw up too much. Together.

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But I’d been warned that three could be a crowd, and while I have zero regrets, it’s no question that a child changes a marriage. New baby brings new fights — about sleep patterns (if I’m up in the night nursing, shouldn’t I get to wake him for the diaper change?), dirty dishes and endless laundry, or crying it out versus constant coddling. Time for the two of you — date nights, lazy Sunday mornings, and, yes, sex — is harder to find. And forget about running off to a last-minute yoga class. Coordinating time for a workout is like an international treaty negotiation: I’ll watch her while you run if you can be back by 3 so I can go to yoga and still be home in time to feed her at 4.

Here are some (depressing) tidbits for you: A recent study by the Open University in England found that couples without children are happier in their relationships than parent couples are. Research from The Gottman Institute, led by renowned relationship therapist Dr. John Gottman, shows that 69% of new parents experience conflict, disappointment and hurt feelings, and two-thirds of couples experience a relationship decline in the first three years of a child’s life. Another study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2009, found that 90 percent of the 218 couples the researchers followed over eight years experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction after having a child.

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It’s enough to scare most couples away from kids forever.

But while my marriage has changed, my satisfaction with my relationship has not. I’m lucky, maybe, but I think preparation was on our side. Plenty of friends shared the same rule: What you say to each other in the middle of the night, when you’re half asleep and stumbling to the changing table, isn’t to be spoken of in the morning. We had a pretty good sleeper (don’t hate me) but just knowing, in advance, that hostile situations would come up was a huge help. When the tense moments came, I knew it wasn’t an issue in our marriage, it wasn’t a problem with our daughter, it was just the normal adjustment to parenthood.

Researchers agree that a key to keeping your marriage strong after baby is being armed for the change. The Gottman Institute even offers a Bringing Baby Home workshop, which aims to prepare would-be parents for their new normal and teaches them to be a good parenting team. “In a relaxed and supportive environment with a trained facilitator, [you’ll] learn how to strengthen your relationship with your partner and foster your baby’s development,” explains the workshop’s website. Urban Balance, a counseling practice with offices throughout Chicago, offers pre- and post-baby couples counseling: Prepare for your new reality, then deal with the sleep deprivation and stress you can never prepare for.

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No one ever said having a baby was easy. But there’s a flip side to all this, too. For every nighttime wakeup, there’s a moment I see Matt giggling with our daughter. All the time washing bottles makes the nights spent vegging out in front of The Voice that much better. Sure, we spent our entire first date night after baby looking at pictures of her and talking about sleep training, but we also drank martinis, and appreciated them. A lot.