Couples Under Strain in Baby’s First Year: When Becoming Parents Changes Your Relationship
Having a baby is often imagined as a joyful event that brings a couple closer together. Sometimes it does. But the first year of parenthood can also put enormous strain on a relationship. Couples who previously felt connected may find themselves arguing more, feeling distant from one another, or wondering what happened to the relationship they had before the baby arrived.
This does not necessarily mean that something has gone wrong. Becoming parents is a profound psychological transition as well as a practical one. In couples therapy for new parents, there can be space to understand not only the conflicts that have emerged, but what becoming a mother, father, or parent has stirred up in each person and between them.
Why Do Couples Struggle After Having a Baby?
The obvious answers matter. New parents are exhausted. Sleep is disrupted. There is more work to do and much less time to do it. Decisions that once seemed minor—who gets up with the baby, who makes dinner, when someone gets to shower—can suddenly feel loaded.
There may also be financial pressure, changes in work, difficulties with breastfeeding or feeding, concerns about the baby's development, differences in parenting styles, and far less time for sex, friends, exercise, or simply being alone.
But these pressures don't fully explain why the transition to parenthood can be so difficult for couples.
A baby doesn't simply add another person to an existing relationship. The arrival of a baby reorganizes the relationship itself.
Two people who were primarily partners are now also parents. Each has a new relationship with the baby, and each must encounter a new version of the other person: not simply “my partner”, but “my partner as a mother” or “my partner as a father.” That change can bring tenderness and admiration, but it can also bring disappointment, jealousy, anger, loneliness, and feelings that are harder to acknowledge.
“I Feel Like I’m Doing Everything”
One of the most common conflicts between new parents concerns the division of labor.
Sometimes the imbalance is quite real. One parent may be carrying substantially more of the childcare, household work, planning, remembering, researching, and scheduling.
But arguments about labor can also become arguments about something more difficult to put into words.
“I do everything” may also contain:
Do you see how much I am giving?
Do you understand what this has cost me?
Can I depend on you?
Do I matter to you anymore?
Meanwhile, the other parent may feel perpetually criticized or as though nothing they do is good enough. They may withdraw, become defensive, or focus increasingly on work or activities outside the home. This can leave the first partner feeling even more abandoned, creating a painful cycle in which each person's way of protecting themselves intensifies the other's distress.
Couples therapy can help new parents move beyond keeping score long enough to become curious about what the score has come to represent.
The Baby Can Change Who Gets to Need Whom
Before having a child, couples develop their own ways of caring for and depending on one another. The arrival of a baby can suddenly disrupt that balance.
One partner may become intensely occupied with the baby. This is often necessary, particularly during the earliest months of life. But the other partner can experience the new closeness between parent and baby in complicated ways.
They may feel excluded or unnecessary. They may envy the baby's access to their partner while simultaneously feeling ashamed for having such a reaction. They may retreat rather than risk acknowledging how much they themselves want care and attention.
The parent who is more immersed in caring for the baby may have a very different experience. Instead of feeling powerful or preferred, they may feel consumed by another person's needs. They may desperately want their partner to notice that they need to be cared for, too.
Both people can therefore feel neglected at exactly the same time.
Becoming a Parent Can Bring Your Own Childhood Back
Having a baby can also awaken memories and feelings about one's own childhood in ways that are not always conscious.
A crying baby may stir something different in a person who grew up with a frightened parent than in someone whose caregivers responded to distress with irritation. Dependence may feel natural to one parent and overwhelming to another. One person may become highly vigilant about the baby's needs; another may feel an urgent need for the baby to become independent. Or perhaps both parents are aligned regarding wanting the baby to become more independent, and the baby’s reaction to this upsets the couple’s balance.
Couples can then find themselves arguing intensely about sleep, feeding, schedules, discipline, grandparents, or how quickly to respond when the baby cries.
These are real parenting decisions. But sometimes they also carry the emotional histories of two families.
Each parent arrives with ideas—often unspoken—about what a mother should be, what a father should be, what a family should look like, and what love and care are supposed to feel like. Parenthood brings these expectations into unusually close contact.
Resentment After Having a Baby
Resentment can be particularly difficult for new parents because this is a period when people often believe they are supposed to feel grateful.
A parent may love their baby enormously and still resent how dramatically their life has changed.
They may resent their partner's ability to leave for work. Or resent being the one who has to leave.
They may resent breastfeeding. They may resent not being able to breastfeed. They may resent that one person's body, career, sleep, or freedom seems to have changed more than the other's.
And because these feelings can seem incompatible with being a loving parent or partner, they may be difficult to talk about directly.
Unspoken resentment doesn't necessarily disappear. It can instead emerge through criticism, irritability, withdrawal, arguments about seemingly trivial things, or a growing feeling of estrangement within the relationship.
When One Parent Seems to Be Adjusting Better Than the Other
Partners don't always make the transition to parenthood at the same pace.
One person may feel immediately attached to the baby while the other takes months to develop that connection. One may find parenthood meaningful while the other privately mourns their previous life. One may be experiencing postpartum depression or anxiety, while the other becomes increasingly overwhelmed trying to compensate.
These differences can easily be interpreted personally:
You don't want this family.
You care more about the baby than you do about me.
You don't understand what I'm going through.
I'm alone in this.
Sometimes what looks like a relationship problem is partly a difficulty one partner is experiencing individually. Often, however, individual and relationship struggles become intertwined.
Couples Therapy for New Parents
Couples often wait until their relationship feels close to breaking before seeking help. Therapy can also be useful much earlier—when partners notice that they are becoming stuck in the same arguments, avoiding one another, losing affection, or beginning to experience each other primarily as adversaries.
In psychodynamic couples therapy for new parents, the goal isn't simply to teach couples to communicate more effectively, although communication can certainly improve.
We can also become interested in why particular conflicts have acquired so much emotional force.
Why does a request for help feel like criticism?
Why does criticism feel unbearable?
Why does one partner pursue while the other withdraws?
Why does it feel so difficult to ask directly to be cared for?
What has becoming a parent meant to each person?
And what happens between the couple when both people need something at the same time?
Understanding these patterns can allow partners to experience each other with more complexity and less certainty about the other's motives.
Your Relationship Doesn't Have to Look Like It Did Before the Baby
The goal is not necessarily to restore the relationship exactly as it was. The couple that existed before the baby cannot simply be recreated. The question is how intimacy can develop again between the people the partners have now become. It may be to build a relationship capable of holding something more complicated: two partners, two individual people, and two parents, all occupying the same family.
That development can be difficult. It can also create forms of intimacy that weren't possible before.
Couples Therapy for New Parents in Washington, DC
I provide couples therapy for new parents in Washington, DC, for couples struggling with the transition to parenthood. My approach is psychoanalytic and psychodynamic, with an interest in understanding the deeper emotional patterns underlying conflict rather than focusing only on the surface disagreement.
Couples may seek therapy because they are fighting after having a baby, experiencing resentment or emotional distance, struggling with sex and intimacy after childbirth, disagreeing about parenting, or simply feeling that they have lost each other somewhere during the first year of their baby's life.
Start Therapy for New Parents in Washington, DC, Bethesda, MD, and Chevy Chase, MD
You don't have to wait until the relationship is in crisis to become curious about what is happening between you. Therapy can provide a place to understand how becoming parents has changed your relationship—and how you might begin finding one another again within the family you are creating. You can start working with Nina Van Sant, LICSW by following these simple steps:
Meet with a caring psychodynamic therapist
Navigate the changes in your relationship with the support you deserve!
Other Services Offered with Nina Van San, LICSW
In addition to postpartum therapy, I also provide a variety of services to help clients who are navigating a wide range of emotional challenges and mental health concerns. Other services offered include infertility-related stress, psychoanalysis, and therapy for teens and older adults at different developmental stages. I also provide support for expats and international professionals who are managing cultural adjustment, relocation stress, and major life changes. You can visit my blog or about page for more support today!