Two out of three couples say marriage got worse after baby. Here's how to keep your romance alive
“You’ll never sleep again.” “You have no idea how tired you’ll be.” “Forget sex.”
Expecting a baby? You’ve heard it all before. As a recent Wall Street Journal article put it, babies are “So Cute, So Hard on a Marriage.” According to the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle, about two-thirds of couples say that within three years of the birth of a child, conflict and hostility increased dramatically.
Does becoming a mother change the essence of who you are?
When you're the stay-at-home mother of an infant, you spend almost no time alone, and thinking goes out the window, unless you count anxious fretting over when to start solid foods and how to persuade the baby to go down for a nap. It's unclear to me now why I imagined this wouldn't be a difficult adjustment.
Sex after baby: how one couple's sex life improved after giving birth.
"The childbirth books speak of diminished desire post-birth and suggest lubrication, but nobody talks about the other possibility. What if sex were better? What if all of the inhibitions and disparaging thoughts that once filled our heads fled? What if the very act of childbirth forced them out?" How one couple's sex life improved after they had a baby.
Getting mind and body back in the mood after giving birth isn't always easy.
Many women go through a postpartum libido drought. This dry spell is caused by natural bodily changes and may be the result of depression or even breast-feeding! Sometimes it can even last for months and can cause a significant strain on your relationships. Are our hormones too out of balance to even think about doing THAT? Or is there something more to it? Elizabeth Uppman gets to bottom of this all-too-common phenomenon in a very personal essay.
A working mother explores the role men assume in housework and childrearing.
Why don’t men do their share of the grocery shopping, laundry and other domestic chores? Women can keep complaining about how men don’t do their share of the housework—or they can change the rules. Leslie Bennetts calls for revolution.
