To think babies shouldn’t ruin relationships

[lighttheresomewhere]

It’s so interesting and genuinely so heartwrenching to see the amount of posts on here (and hear it in real life too) about the amount of relationships that drastically change for the worst and even break after having a baby/babies.

we have a 11 month old and I feel like it’s brought us even closer. My husband is a fantastic dad and husband and last night I got all dressed up for him coming to bed and when we were going to sleep he said thank you for making sure we didn’t lose us. I said what do you mean? He said ‘we haven’t lost us’. He started saying about the roommate phase and how we never went through that etc. I said it wasn’t a conscious decision it was just natural that I wanted to have sex pretty early on again, I wanted us to still have date nights and be us but it subconscious. I told him I fell in love with him all over again in a whole new way seeing him bond with the baby.

im not trying to be antagonistic or anything I just genuinely don’t understand how relationships go to shit so much after babies.

My turn! I can’t understand how people can let themselves get fat. Surely you just eat healthy and exercise? It’s so easy for me to stay a size 10, why can’t everyone do it! I couldn’t imagine letting myself go so much to the extent I needed liposuction or something! 🤔🤔

Mine was a fish pie. Made a terrible mess

This just reeks of Molly-Mae Hague’s “if you’re homeless just buy a house” comment

yeah just start a business or get a better education - that’s so easy, obviously 🙄

Ooh, no - you'd want to hope your neighbours are mumsnetters.
They'd just assume you'd realised the error of your ways and were jettisoning the dread double carbs asap.

Dear god I’m not even going to delve in to how problems having an amazing dad actually caused for me with my narcissistic mother. Of whose abuse I was having to live with until she forced me out.

I sadly no longer have my beloved dad in this life, but thank god he always told me I’m cut from a different cloth than my mum. And showed me how amazing I am. Because if it was down to my mother my self worth would be non existent and I’d be depending on a man with money which so painfully drummed into me was her expectation. I now have no one apart from my DH. So yes I can relate to Jane

To be fair, you've posted in aibu. If you'd posted in relationships or parenting then you might have received more measured response. Your op came across as quite smug, but I'm sure you didn't mean it to.

It's relatively easy to parent a baby, op. I know people will say lack of sleep etc etc is a killer, but honestly, for me/ dh it was the easy part. Things got harder when they grow and you need to start behaviour management and discipline. That's when you really discover how similar/ different your parenting approaches are. It takes sustained hard work to find a compromise. And don't be lulled into a false sense of security with having one. If you have more than one then suddenly you're torn in two, sometimes three directions. Best also hope there's no disability, which complicates dynamics immeasurably.

Ds was easy. Me and dh agreed for the most part on parenting him. Life was relatively straightforward. Six years later dd came along. Easy as a baby, but very different to ds. 7 years later, and after a huge number of tears along the way, we're on the verge of a diagnosis for nd. Dh and I are still together, but his health issues have certainly caused challenges, including frequent hospital stays. Ageing brings challenges, life stages bring challenges. I still love him and would rather parent with him, and I wouldn't change dd or our family at all. But we've discussed divorce, primarily because an nd child requires such different parenting to a neurotypical one. We've all had to learn to adjust so much - including our ds.

So while I hope that things continue as they are for you, it's slightly naive to think that your circumstances won't change, or that you'll always put your dh first or that you'll always agree on how to parent together.

when we were going to sleep he said thank you for making sure we didn’t lose us.

Does he always speak like a character in bad chick-lit? 😂🤮

My marriage has survived four kids, but only just.

Why don't they survive?

Birth injuries (I've had 2nd and 3rd degree tears)
Body issues
Financial issues (maternity pay, childcare)
Lack of sleep
Colicky children
Postnatal depression

Your post is so privileged and naive. Doesn't take a genius to wonder why children can affect relationships

With all due respect @lighttheresomewhere your baby is only 11months…imagine it as getting on a rollercoaster ride you haven’t even started the ride yet, you are still in the fucking queue! So yeah…there’s still plenty of time for it to all go to shit! You’re not out the other side yet!! Not even bloody close!

Sorry OP, didn't you know that MN hates people who have happy lives and manage a baby perfectly well? You were always going to get this kind of spiteful comment, and all the others. Personally I very pleased for you and hope your happiness as a family continues.

Life will get better for you once you realise everyone is in different circumstances

naive and privileged.

Two crossed off the bingo card of spite!

‘Happiness as a family’ tell me you didn’t read the whole thread without telling me, OPs life is a shit show

The responses on this are typical Mumsnet - a few months ago a woman posted that she worried that her and her husband were too happy to risk it by having kids everyone tore her a new one and said that it’s easy to have a happy relationship after kids and if kids damaged a relationship it was crap anyway. Now you’re all saying the opposite 🙄

Almost like everyone just wants to tear down happy people!

Lucky you 😅

@JudgeJ What would your response to the OP be in an AIBU, when she says that she has no idea why any relationship may deteriorate following having kids. And telling mumsnet that the onus is on all mothers to keep the fires of passion burning?

You sound naive, only one baby and 11 months in.
I don't know your circumstance but I will say being a stay at home mum to one baby with a partner who is appreciative of what you do and an involved father and still does stuff around the home is miles different to a situation where both people are still working while also being sleep deprived or a stay at home mum whose partner is not appreciative and thinks she 'does nothing all day' and doesn't help out around the house and leaves everything to her. In both of these situations resentment builds and damages.
Also some couples will have problems after the first baby for all the reasons people have already said but I think the majority of couples who go south after kids it's 2-3 children in, YEARS of sleep deprivation, build up resentment etc.

So I don’t think it’s having babies that's the problem - the issues were in the relationship before they arrived, but having them makes it harder to ignore them. A selfish partner, an unbalanced relationship, lack of mutual respect/values/goals is always an issue.

It’s sort of why I never slept with anyone I wasn’t willing to have in my life as the father of my child: pregnancy is always a risk and every time you have sex you risk having that person on your life forever in some way.

At the risk of sounding like Mary Whitehouse, people need to stop and think before entering a sexual relationship. It’s not about the morality of sex outside marriage etc, it’s about understanding the consequences of the bond that a child brings, the obligations. And for most men, there aren’t any really as they can still walk away.

I know, right?

Almost like there's a few million people on Mumsnet instead of, say, thirty and they don't all think the same or reply on exactly the same threads!

You clearly have a very easy baby. Congrats! It's always nice to be able to share your smugness with the less fortunate isn't it?

And, "we all have the same 24 hours in a day" shite 🙄Pretty sure the women on this site caring for their disabled children and/or living in poverty have a VERY different 24hours than me.

I think if op had said

'Me and my husband are more in love than ever and our relationship feels stronger because we've bonded through having a baby' that would have been better. Still a bit of a boast but otherwise a nice story and how things should ideally be when two people have a child together.

However she actually said that she put on sexy underwear and her husband thanked her for 'not losing us' which I don't personally think is very romantic at all. It's not the brag op thinks it is.

Here to say my bit.
Will probably cause displeasure.
I firmly believe that kids ruin lives, relationships,
(women's) bodies and more.
Child free.
Since I was a kid in another country, I have keenly observed other women (quiet kid was welcome).
The happiest ones were singletons, widows or the ones who didn't have a man and a child living with them.
Very few, though.
It stuck.
🥴

I’m glad it worked for you, making others feel bad that it ruined theirs is nasty. It absolutely destroyed mine, he’d had 3 kids before - declared ‘he wanted this baby but he wasn’t doing the work again’ work his job baby my job - 24/7’ I’d be crying when he got home, I’d be told to get it adopted as I clearly wasn’t mother material as I couldn’t breastfeed. I’m glad that it showed what an absolute bastard he was, me and her did just fine without him