Interested in others’ experiences. My DH is a solidly 50-50 partner, so I know I’ve got it better than a lot of women. However, since having our baby 6 months ago, things seem off. Our baby is not especially difficult and we have quite a lot of family support, so I feel guilty for struggling.
We rarely have time for each other anymore. We rarely have conversations that aren’t about the baby or general life drudgery. We don’t go out and do things, really. If we have an opportunity to get a break from the baby, we use it to sleep or do self-care like exercise. His job is demanding so he often works in evenings/ weekends. On the rare occasion where we have tried to go out together, we’ve just talked about the baby, or life drudgery. We used to travel together all the time and those were our special times together that we’d look forward to. For (several) obvious reasons, this is no longer possible.
We are both quite worn down by our new lives, and we’ve become quite bickery/ snappy. Tried talking about it and coming up with ways to improve, but nothing has worked so far.
I thought I wanted more kids, but I’m not sure the relationship would survive if we had double the childcare burden.
I also feel a strange sort of resentment because the baby has had such a huge impact on my body/ emotions/ career, and he hasn’t had to deal with any of that.
I can see how a lot of relationships just deteriorate at this point. Does it get better?