Does Having Kids Ruin Your Relationship?

Maybe? But not forever......

After we had our first baby six years ago I hated my husband. OK, maybe hate is a strong word, but I did really dislike him a lot of the time. It’s hard to explain how this happened, how this human being that I had fallen in love with only two years earlier on a boat in the goddamn Galapagos, who I traveled around the world with, who I knew immediately I would marry, became such a thorn in my goddamn side. But it happened, and I know I’m not alone.

A lot of my friends have told me that having their first baby made them resent their spouse, even if they would never ever admit that out loud until years later. (Spoiler: I loved my husband very much….NOW). But there was something about having that first baby, about becoming a mother, that made it seem impossible to give enough care and devotion to anyone else. And for months I resented my husband for wanting anything from me. I was also exhausted and depressed and riddled with anxiety. I didn’t love anyone, not even myself. We got through it. There was light and love on the other side of sleep deprivation and Sertraline.

I thought about those days a lot this week while I was reporting a piece for Bustle on the HR-ification of marriage, of how more and more couples are using work tools like Slack, Google Docs and weekly meetings to manage their marriage and households.

I’m a big fan of these. In the piece I got to talk to Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play, about why we need these work-inspired processes to maintain the love, respect, comraderie and passion we came into a marriage with.

Here is what Rodsky told me:

The idea, Rodsky says, is that when people have explicitly defined expectations, when they know their role, when there is fairness, transparency, and accountability and trust — then they can thrive. “If you put two people in an organization or in a home and you don’t know your role, then you’re screwed,” she says. 

There’s also a sense of emotional safety when you aren’t mired in the chaos and decision fatigue that can result from not having these kinds of organizational meetings and tools with your spouse. I don’t know about anyone else, but I need that level of calm if I ever want to have sex with my husband.

I also got to chat with Becky Viera author of the book Enough About the Baby: A Brutally Honest Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood. Viera and her husband have their own couples Slack channel to deal with all the bullshit of running a household together.

Viera has written extensively about how having a kid impacts a marriage, whether it ruins a relationship. I want to share with you an essay she adapted from her book (order this for every pregnant woman in your life) about this very topic because I truly think about it ALL the time. She doesn’t just talk about how having a kid nearly ruined her own marriage, she offers wildly useful advice for how to fix it! Here’s Becky’s story:

My son was just shy of three months old on the day I decided to leave my husband. Archie was in his bassinet beside me while I was googling furiously.

I was looking at apartment rentals, divorce attorneys, and how marital property is split in the state of California once the union is dissolved. Yes, I was tired and frantic; my searches were a bit erratic and followed no linear path. But I wasn’t being dramatic or exaggerating my feelings. I was finished and wanted out.

Our marriage was falling apart because of everything. And nothing. Everything, as in the big blowout fights that we’d been having since our son was born. Anytime we had to discuss something that required an opinion, we seemed to skip 0–9 and instead began the conversation at a 10. It could be as simple as what we wanted to eat for dinner, but tensions were so high that going into any conversation felt like someone was ringing a bell, signaling the start of a new round in a boxing match. And it was also nothing. Sometimes there were no arguments and no issues that I could put my finger on, but everything felt off. My husband had begun to feel like a stranger. We didn’t laugh together. All we ever talked about was our son, and I found myself not even enjoying being around him.

We’d just had yet another fight on the phone when he’d called me from work to check in. I can’t even remember what it was about because it was so insignificant. Maybe I asked him to pick up baby wipes on his way home or he told me he felt tired that day. It didn’t matter because everything was a trigger for us at that point.

It was the moment when I felt like I’d finally had enough. That the best thing for everyone was to end this now and somehow salvage enough goodwill that we could be amicable co-parents. But, based on the way things had been going, even that seemed like an unlikely possibility.

What I didn’t know at the time was that it wasn’t just us. A newborn can—and likely will—strain any relationship to varying degrees. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been together or if you rarely have conflicts or disagreements: Once you become parents, everything will change.