It's Sunday morning. Stretching out in bed, your toes touch your partner's leg. In that warm languid moment between dreaming and waking, you reach over for a kiss. But you never make it. A little voice at the end of the bed shrieks: "Get up, mummy! Get up!"
However much you've longed for children by the man or woman of your dreams, their arrival disrupts romance and can destroy intimacy.
PHOTO: AP
Even if they don't wreck a relationship, they do make it harder to stay on track. In the heady days of early courtship not only do you find each other interesting and adorable most of the time but when you do fall out you have a whole weekend to row about it. Try having any two-sentence discussion in the presence of a toddler.
It has been said that a baby is a hand grenade thrown into the heart of a marriage. Steve Biddulph, father of two (15 and 8), psychologist, counsellor of children and parents, and childcare guru (he wrote the bestsellers Raising Boys and The Secret of Happy Children), agrees that the arrival of a child is potentially explosive. But in his latest book, How Love Works, he claims that couples can stop the bomb from going off.
The first step is patience. Biddulph believes that most of us are in love with a fantasy when we get together. "Learning to love another human being takes 10 years," he says. "People are often just beginning that process when they have kids."
"Our work as counsellors has made us believe that two thirds of divorces are preventable. Life is tough. You don't get a relationship that's life-enriching just fall into your lap; it's a long-term project."
And central to this project are the arguments that many couples -- particularly those with children -- try so hard to avoid. You have to fight your way to closeness, Biddulph insists.
Many couples go through a period of disengagement after having children. Broken nights, the social isolation of being at home with a child or the dual demands of working and childcare can make couples lose touch with each other. "It happens by accident," says Biddulph. "Often the couple used to argue but they become afraid to fight in front of the kids. You can achieve things by rowing, people are often willing to change their behavior when they understand a person's view."
Often the changes may be practical: a man may want to have more responsibility for the child without being supervised, a woman may feel that her partner works too hard. The golden rule of rowing is to focus on the specific and don't be abusive. "Research shows that couples who fight quite a bit are happier five years later, as long as they are not fighting abusively," says Biddulph. "If you call each other names, that's death to a relationship. You have to fight clean in front of kids but you can be upfront about your feelings.
"When Shaaron [his co-author, partner of 25 years and wife for the past 16 of those] and I started rowing we had to have ground rules. Her family had been violent, so she needed us to agree that no one would hurt anyone and my need was to agree that neither of us would walk out. We had our first row 20 years ago and it was so intense that at one stage I lifted a door off its hinges. I can't remember what it was about. I'd say it's OK to throw crockery -- just not at each other."
Some of the difficulty in maintaining a relationship when couples have children is the lack of time they have to discuss how they feel about things. Partners may have different ideas about what mothers' and fathers' roles should be -- often inherited from their own childhoods. "You accumulate misunderstandings," says Biddulph.
"When we first managed to have a weekend away together without the children, we argued all the time. We had catch-up fighting to do. When you have little kids you can go for two years passing in the corridor, living on the memory of when you used to be in love. You need to ask each other, `how's your life going?'"
Sex can become a minefield, too. "Tiredness, especially for women, is often a barrier," says Biddulph. "If a man takes his share of the childcare and housework, the couple are more likely to have sex. It's hard to feel loving towards someone who you are angry with for not pulling their weight. You have to be creative, too, just to have time together. I know couples who go home in the middle of the day to be together."
While it might seem idyllic to do everything together as a family, Biddulph cautions against it. "We find that couples with strong relationships, who have been together for a long time, often take a holiday separately once a year. Being separate for a while creates an electrical charge between you."
David and Maureen are an example of such a couple. Both 40, they have been married for 15 years and have two children, aged nine and six. They spend a week or so apart each year; David playing golf, Maureen on work-related trips. "You have to be terribly good friends for your relationship to work once you have kids," says Maureen. `We go out together at least once a week for a meal and to watch a film.
"It's an expensive way of maintaining a relationship -- about US$160 a night once we've paid the babysitter -- but eating out is important because it makes you talk. The children need to know that we lead our own lives and we are together because we want to be."
If you can't remember why you are together, Biddulph advises seeing a marriage counsellor and working at your relationship. "It's not that I don't believe in romantic love but in most societies in history, people are thrown together and learn to love each other," he says. "In our society, love starts as a blessing and continues as an accomplishment."
How Love Works is published by Thorsons.
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