Becoming a couple again

Six months in, my wife and I sat on the couch one Sunday night after the baby had finally gone down. We had a glass of wine each. We watched twenty minutes of a show. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I stayed awake long enough to register that I couldn't remember the last conversation we'd had that wasn't about feeds, naps, vaccinations, or what to defrost.

We were co-parenting a small human extremely well. We were no longer being a couple at all.

This module is about that gap. How it opens, why it widens fast, and what to do about it before resentment moves in and starts paying rent.

What four months of broken sleep does to a marriage

Sleep deprivation is not a vibes problem. It is a physiological problem with a marital signature. Studies are blunt about it: couples in the first year of parenting report the steepest relationship-satisfaction drop of their entire marriage, and the dip is sharpest between months four and twelve.

The mechanics are predictable:

• Short fuses on both sides. The thing that would have been a shrug in 2024 is a fight on a Tuesday in 2026.
• A bookkeeping mentality. Who got up last. Who did the bath. Who got the lie-in. The scoreboard runs whether you want it to or not.
• Touch becomes functional. You hand each other the baby. You don't hand each other anything else.
• Conversations narrow to logistics. Daycare. Wipes. The 4am wake. The Wednesday GP. Nothing else has room.

None of this means the marriage is broken. It means the marriage is starving and behaving accordingly.

The "we're co-parents not partners" trap

The trap looks like good behaviour from the outside. You're a great team on the baby. You communicate clearly about feeds and sleeps. You handle the household admin together. You are a high-functioning unit.

You are also no longer a couple. You are a small business with a child as the only product. The risk is that you mistake the operational fluency for the relationship being fine, and one day in the second year you realise you haven't had a real conversation in eight months and you don't know how to start one.

The signal that you've slipped into co-parent mode:

• You can't remember the last time you laughed together at something that wasn't the baby.
• You schedule logistics. You don't schedule each other.
• The last meaningful compliment one of you paid the other was about parenting, not about being a person.
• Sex is either gone or transactional, both of you executing rather than wanting.

If three of those are true, you're co-parenting. The fix is mechanical, not romantic. You schedule the relationship back in.

Sex, returning awkwardly or not at all

Nobody talks about this part honestly, so here is the honest version.

Postpartum sex is not the sex you used to have. Not for a while. The body-image piece for her is real and lasts longer than men think (the postpartum body in a magazine is not the postpartum body in your bedroom). Pelvic floor recovery is real. Hormonal flatness from breastfeeding is real, and it can flatten libido for months. Add five hours of sleep and you have two adults who, on most nights, would genuinely rather sleep than do anything else with the bed.

What helps:

• Lower the bar from "sex" to "being physical with each other." A long hug at the kitchen counter. Holding hands on the couch. Sitting on the same end of the sofa instead of opposite ends. Touch precedes desire; in this period, sometimes by months.
• Have the conversation, badly if necessary. "I miss you. I don't expect anything. I just want to say it." That sentence, said clearly once a fortnight, does more than any romantic gesture.
• Don't keep score. The number of times in the last month is the worst metric you could use right now.
• Do see your GP if six months in nothing has shifted. Postpartum hormonal issues are real and treatable. Most men don't suggest this, because they don't want to seem to be making it her problem. It isn't her problem. It's a medical question with a medical answer.

The sex returns. It returns at a different pace than it left. The couples who don't survive the first year are not the ones whose sex slowed down; they're the ones who took the slowdown personally.

Conversations to have before resentment moves in

Resentment in a young-parent marriage builds on five quiet topics. Have these on purpose, before they become the source of a 10pm kitchen fight.

1. The default housework distribution. Almost every couple discovers that the pre-baby division of labour silently re-weighted onto whichever parent is home with the kid. By month six, one of you is doing 70 percent. The conversation is not "who works harder"; it's "what does the new normal look like, and is it sustainable?"

2. The mental load. Who keeps the calendar, the daycare emails, the vaccination schedule, the present-buying for her parents, the family social diary. This load is invisible until you list it on a shared note. List it on a shared note.

3. Time off. Real time off. Not "the baby's asleep, finally." Time where neither of you is responsible for the small human. One Saturday morning a fortnight where she goes for a long walk and you take the baby. One Sunday afternoon a fortnight where you go to the gym and she takes the baby. Schedule it. Don't barter for it.

4. Money. Cash flow shifts when one of you is on parental leave or part-time. The pre-baby budget no longer applies. The pretending-it-still-applies costs the marriage more than the actual numbers do.

5. What we're each missing. She might be missing her career. You might be missing your weekend mornings. Both are legitimate. Naming them is not weakness; it's accuracy. The unsaid version is what calcifies into a year-three resentment.

Date night as a discipline, not a luxury

Most men, told to schedule a date night, will say "we don't have time." The truth is that most couples have two and a half hours between the baby going down and one of them passing out. That window can be a TV show watched in silence, or it can be a date.

A practical rule that works:

• One night a week, after the baby is asleep, you put both phones in another room.
• One drink, two if you can, no more.
• A simple question to start: "What's been hardest this week, and what's been good?"
• Listen to the answer without trying to solve it.

That's it. It's not a candlelit dinner. It's a meeting that pretends not to be one. Ninety minutes once a week, every week.

If you can engineer it, one full out-of-the-house date a month, with a babysitter or grandparent, dressed differently, in a place that isn't your kitchen. The first one will feel awkward. The second one will save the year.

A thing you should hear plainly

Most marriages survive the first year of parenting. The ones that don't usually had problems before the baby that the baby surfaced. The first year doesn't break good marriages. It does, however, reveal which marriages were running on inertia, on the absence of stress, on the steady arrival of weekend mornings and Friday-night dinners.

If you're in a good one, the first year just makes it harder. The work you do now (the date nights, the conversations, the protected time off, the honesty about sex) is the work that gets you to year three with both of you still standing.

Schedule the relationship. Speak about the hard things. Touch each other on purpose.

Further watching

• Esther Perel explains why couples fight | SVT/TV 2/Skavlan
• A conversation on new parenthood with Plum, Esther Perel and Dr. Alexandra Sacks