Why Does Your Relationship Change After Having Children?
Before you had children, you probably expected your life to change...
You knew you'd have less sleep. Less freedom. More responsibility. You knew your weekends would look different and that leaving the house would now require 17 bags.
But you might not have expected quite how much your relationship would change after having children.
Couples often come to therapy worried that the fact they're arguing more, having less sex, feeling resentful or living more like housemates means that something has gone wrong between them.
And sometimes, of course, there are difficulties within the relationship that need addressing.
But, before we decide what these changes mean about your relationship, I think we need to understand something much more fundamental:
Your relationship is now trying to exist in completely different circumstances.
Having children doesn't just add another person to your family. It changes your time, your priorities, your responsibilities, your identities and the amount that is being asked of both of you.
So perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that your relationship changes too.
1. Your relationship is under more pressure than it used to be
Think about the resources your relationship had before children.
Time
Sleep
Spontaneity
Privacy
Money
Energy
Space to recover after a difficult day
Opportunities to have conversations without someone shouting “MUM!” halfway through them
Then children arrive and, for many couples, several of those resources reduce at exactly the same time as the demands on them increase.
There is suddenly an extraordinary amount to do. There are feeds, nappies and night wakings at first. Then nursery runs, packed lunches, school emails, medical appointments, clubs, birthday parties, homework, childcare arrangements, food shopping, washing, bedtimes and an endless stream of things that need remembering.
And that's before we add jobs, finances, housework, friendships, wider family, looking after ourselves and everything else that was already there.
In my relationship guide, I describe family life as a never-ending list of things to do and things to sort. There can simply be too much to do for the amount of time, energy and resources a couple has available.
That matters.
Because when we're overwhelmed, exhausted and desperately trying to keep everything going, it's very easy to look across at the other adult in the room and think:
Why aren't you doing more?
Or:
Why am I the only one who seems to care about this?
Suddenly you're arguing about the dishwasher
Or who's turn it is to get up
Or why they didn't realise the PE kit needed washing
Or why one of you has been sitting on their phone for 10 minutes while the other is still doing things
The argument might look tiny from the outside, but it doesn't feel tiny.
Because the dishwasher can very quickly become:
You don't notice how much I'm doing.
Which can become:
You don't see how overwhelmed I am.
Which can become:
You don't care about me.
And of course you're going to feel angry, hurt or resentful if that's what you believe your partner's behaviour means. Sometimes one of the most helpful things we can do is become curious about the difference between what happened and what we decided it meant.
2. Neither of you is the same person you were before
Having children doesn't just change your circumstances.
It changes you.
Becoming a parent can change your relationship with your body, your work, your ambitions, your friendships, your own parents, your freedom, your identity and your priorities.
It can bring up things from your own childhood that you haven't thought about for years.
It can change what frightens you
It can change what matters to you
It can change what you need from your partner
And while all of that is happening to you, something quite inconvenient is happening at exactly the same time:
Your partner is changing too (I know, what a nightmare!)
In my guide, I talk about how becoming parents means both people are navigating their own enormous transition while simultaneously having to adjust to the changes happening in their partner.
And you won't necessarily experience that transition in the same way.
One person may experience pregnancy, birth, physical recovery or breastfeeding.
One person's career might change more than the other's.
One may feel that their entire identity has been swallowed by parenthood while the other feels pushed to the outside of the new parent-child relationship.
You may experience bonding differently
Sleep differently
Work differently
You may feel completely different social pressures about what being a 'good' parent is supposed to look like.
My guide explores some of these different frames of reference, particularly the different pressures mothers and fathers can experience within heterosexual relationships.
That doesn't mean one person's experience is harder or more important than the other's.
It means that you can live in the same house, raise the same children and experience family life very differently.
And if we assume our partner is experiencing all of this in the same way we are, it can become incredibly difficult to understand each other.
How can you not see this?
Why doesn't this bother you?
Why do I have to think about everything?
Why don't you want me anymore?
Why do you always take their side?
Why can't you understand how exhausted I am?
Sometimes your partner genuinely doesn't know what it's like to be you. And you don't entirely know what it's like to be them. That's not necessarily evidence of a bad relationship. But it is something we need to get curious about.
3. Your relationship can quietly move to the bottom of the list
Children are extremely effective at communicating their needs.
They cry
They shout
They climb onto you
They wake you up
They follow you into the toilet
They tell you they're hungry approximately 4 minutes after refusing the meal you made them
Your relationship tends to be rather less demanding.
It doesn't scream because you haven't had a proper conversation for three weeks.
It doesn't wake you at 2am because you haven't had sex for months.
It doesn't throw itself onto the supermarket floor because the two of you haven't done anything enjoyable together recently.
So when family life becomes busy, it's incredibly easy for the relationship to receive whatever is left over.
(And sometimes there isn't much left.)
In my free relationship guide, I talk about four different areas we have to juggle:
The children. Ourselves. Our partner. The relationship.
Children will quite rightly be the priority a lot of the time. They are dependent on us and aren't responsible for meeting their own needs.
But they cannot be the priority all of the time.
Sometimes you need to come first
Sometimes your partner needs to come first
And sometimes the relationship itself needs to come first
That doesn't mean elaborate date nights every Friday. Prioritising your relationship might mean noticing that your partner has had an awful day and taking something off their plate. It might mean putting your phones down for twenty minutes. It might mean acknowledging something your partner is carrying that usually goes unnoticed. It might mean actually addressing a recurring argument rather than hoping it disappears. And sometimes it might mean getting some outside support.
The important thing is recognising that your relationship needs something from you too.
So, has something gone wrong with your relationship?
Maybe.
There can, of course, be serious difficulties between couples that shouldn't simply be dismissed as “this is what happens when you have kids.”
But arguing more doesn't automatically mean you've chosen the wrong person.
Feeling disconnected doesn't automatically mean you've fallen out of love.
Feeling irritated by your partner doesn't automatically mean your relationship is failing.
Sometimes these things are telling us that the relationship is struggling under the circumstances in which we're asking it to function.
And that's a very different conclusion.
Because “something is wrong with us” can leave us frightened, defensive and looking for evidence that our partner is the problem.
Whereas:
“Something is difficult for us at the moment”
gives us somewhere else to go.
We can get curious...
What's changed?
What are each of us carrying?
What are we missing about the other's experience?
What have we started assuming about each other?
What does our relationship need now that perhaps it didn't need before?
You don't need to recreate the couple you were before you had children.
You aren't those people anymore.
The task is to get to know the couple you've become.
Want to understand what's happening between you?
If you've read this thinking “God, this sounds like us”, I've created a free guide for exactly this.
Your Relationship in the Face of Parenting explores how having children can affect your relationship, including resentment, the mental load and distribution of responsibilities, prioritising your relationship and understanding the different experiences you can have of becoming parents.
It's designed to help you start thinking differently about what's happening between the two of you — and what you might be able to do about it.
You can get the guide completely free when you join my mailing list.
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