I’ve heard so many times in the last few months from people who have split up from their partners, from people who are unhappy in their relationships, and social media posts how relationships (theirs) have, if not irrevocably broken down, changed considerably for the worst since children came along.
To be honest up front, I am not saying the same about my own marriage. This is just something that popped into my head this morning and started to grow and grow as a thought process/download.
As the thought began to take shape in my mind, I wondered what it meant ‘until the children came along’. In a long-term, committed relationship the idea of children can almost inevitably be raised either to rule out having them or to embrace the possibility of them. Or sometimes pregnancies happen that perhaps medical professionals told you couldn’t happen (as in my case, so there was no real prior discussion between my husband and I) or that weren’t planned but are still welcomed. For some people, the notion of having children becomes planned in a way that a 4-Star General might consider studying. I think the question for me is, where the pregnancy isn’t unplanned, are children a natural progression in a long-term, committed relationship, something we are ‘expected’ to do to fit into society, are they the band-aid that is hoped (even if only at a subconscious level) will keep the relationship together, or is it something that is genuinely a strong desire? And do we even ask any of those questions?
Because there is absolutely no doubt that bringing a child into your relationship changes it completely.
I remember someone I knew at my ante-natal class commenting that her brother-in-law and sister-in-law (I think) were separating 12 years after welcoming twins. We were both going through the pains of newborns, struggling with the lack of sleep and the general sense that underneath it all, we did not have a clue what we were doing. We were both trying to keep our marriages as something that wasn’t just about parenthood and we were exhausted. And I remember distinctly her saying ‘how come, after getting through all of this with twins, all the hard work, that they decide to split up now when things are easier’? At the time, it seemed like a perfectly valid point. They’d survived hormone-induced rages then transmuted into hormone-induced lust which I find the most bizarre aspect of being a new mum. You’d think you would never let your partner near you again, but oh no those hormones kick in with the ‘let’s have another go’ driver. It’s likely why my brother and I (and countless millions of others) are Irish twins. This couple had survived the lack of sleep, the countless worries and panics, the mental and physical exhaustion as a couple only to split up over a decade later. But the question is, I guess, did they after all?
I remember one of the greatest privileges of my life was watching my husband hold his newborn son in his arms, gaze down at him and fall deeply in love. It was a beautiful moment and one I will never forget. As he often says, I had almost a year on him of knowing our son having carried him for 40 weeks and falling deeply in love with him, feeling him and knowing him in a way he couldn’t. In that moment, we both became bound by our deep and abiding love for our child. In that moment, it bonded us as I am sure it does every other couple experiencing that. We joked during the pregnancy that we would get the baby home, put the baby carrier on the coffee table and think ‘what now’? And we weren’t far from the truth. But much like many people get fixated with the wedding and forget about the marriage, you can’t begin to know what it is truly like to have a baby until you have done it, experienced it and come out the other side.
So, where can it go wrong and why do we blame children coming along? Not the children themselves, of course, but what the tsunami of experiences that is bringing up a child or children.
People I’ve spoken to about this have said ‘we had a great relationship before’ and ‘our sex life was great, we were compatible’ but how, over time, all that has gone. Now, people talk about a non-existent sex life, how the relationship has gone from being a romantic one to more of a platonic one with little or no real intimacy, and how habits indulged in before and which were tolerated (e.g. drinking) have either gotten out of control or are simply irritating. How maybe one partner who was once happy with a slightly less than vanilla sex life are now wanting to indulge in full-on kink. How partners are having affairs. And for some, just how fed up they are when they wake up one morning and realise they don’t have, say, two children but three. It’s just that one of those is supposed to be the grown up too. Generally, all of this is underpinned by a complete lack of communication largely because most people are just trying to survive and not wanting to look too deeply at what they are finding unsatisfying. Because to do so, and what it might mean, is utterly terrifying.
As I am writing this, I am thinking that it isn’t about when the children came along. They’re just a convenient watershed moment or distraction. It’s more the fact that as we traverse the passage of time that is life, we change. And if we are so caught up in the surface level, if we are so unconscious of our subconscious, we don’t realise what is happening to us or to our partner until something happens that smacks that change in our face. Maybe an injury or an illness or a moment where you turn to that person and realise…there’s nothing there anymore. The thing that brought you together in the first place has long since burned out because it wasn’t meant to last, you just didn’t know that at the time you committed to each other. That if you’d really dug deep, you would have seen that there were some things about the other person that didn’t quite ‘fit’ but there was enough to gloss over it. Or perhaps the traits you found fun and quirky when you were younger, you’ve matured into thinking that they’re…well, not fun and quirky anymore. In fact, they’re immature and boring.
Sometimes, life makes you take a pause and look around. It makes you go a bit deeper than perhaps you’re comfortable with. You see beyond the superficial, you start to question the life you’ve built. And that is deeply disturbing when you do so. Because your partner may not be anywhere near there yet. Or they are, they’ve come to the same realisation as you, but…you’ve got all this ‘stuff’ around you in terms of the material things you’ve come to enjoy and are reluctant to relinquish. And you’ve got the children who will suffer if you take a huge decision. So, you squash everything back down until ‘later, when the time is right’ but that niggle is still there making you potentially open on some level to doing things you would never have previously contemplated.
But none of this really had anything to do with when the children came along. I equally know of couples who still have a great sex life, who still have an amazing connection with each other, who still operate as a couple separate to their joint parenting.
Fundamentally, what do I think is the difference? I don’t know. I’m tempted to say that this latter group of people met and committed to the ‘right’ people, the people they were meant to meet and stay with. But that’s too trite. The other group of people also met and committed to the right people in that period of their lives. They were meant to go down the path they went down. It’s perhaps just that, now, they need to go down a different path which is always a very scary prospect. Or, they are meant to dig deep together, commit to that process, and find what brought them together in the first place. See if it’s still there, buried under the years of time and conformity.
For some of the people I know, I genuinely hope it’s the latter and they can find a way back to each other if that’s the right outcome for them. For others, they’ve already been through that process, it didn’t work and they took the difficult decision. It doesn’t have to be devastating to the children, that’s entirely up to the parents and how mature and honest they can be about their choices.
The one thing I do know – it really isn’t all about when the children came along.
Louisa Simpson 