5 Ways Not to Hate Your Husband After Children
Since I got married, my “love language” has become the language of love – picking shit off the floor because nothing kills romance or libido faster than cleaning up after someone like a 1950s housewife. Yet it is the norm for many heterosexual young parents: a woman, whether she works or not, will do most of the work (much of her invisible) raising children and running the house. We could have an egalitarian relationship before children; we can expect that after childhood we will have a truly fair division of labor, but when a real child is born – well, it might be like a bomb in your marriage.
First, the amount of work is not entirely clear in advance. Sisyphean labor of dishes, laundry, housekeeping, administration and childcare is just … cruel and unforgiving, as if you were caught in a slow landslide for years. Most people hardly mutter, “I don’t think you understand how hard I work here,” brushing the dirt off their faces.
But the second major problem is more insidious. This lies in our understanding of gender roles, not in the general “only men should work, only women should stay at home”, which I think we (mostly) left behind. Moreover, a million small pieces of information are passed on to women through a social channel – information that is not usually passed on to men. A girl’s first job is often babysitting, and in adulthood she will visit baby showers, during which (whether she wants it or not) she learns about the best sleeping bag with a straitjacket and the best system for keeping babies; Talking to older mothers, she may already have formed an opinion of crying versus sleeping together, or fostering affection versus arming the kids with a machete or something.
Thanks to this information, mothers, even on the first day of their paternity, are far ahead of their fathers in terms of knowledge and experience. And if she doesn’t want to instruct ( and he is willing to instruct, and instruction is more appreciated than just doing it herself), it’s easy to slip away from the scheme in which mothers take on the bulk of childcare and household chores. The situation is slowly changing – now men visit baby showers, and papal blogs are a real phenomenon, but women, generally speaking, still host a home show.
This makes me indignant. This brings me to Jhansi Dunn’s new book, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Children , which she wrote after a crisis in her own marriage, involving division of labor, anger, violent fights and, finally, the realization that if everything does not change, divorce was inevitable. Her meticulously crafted book brings together the social sciences that underpin housework and gender roles (news to me: men will be more awakened by a “strong wind” than a crying baby, while women will levitate when they wake up and run to the nursery – running through the air a la Crouching Tiger, Latent Dragon – actually an infant snort) with a first-person interview and her own conjugal experiments in counseling couples. She even turned to the FBI Crisis Negotiator for help.
Note: her how-to guide is primarily for heterosexual couples – there is more research on heterosexual couples than same-sex couples, and hetero couples have to deal with all of the aforementioned gender role-playing programs – but the book is very useful for anyone who has ever took offense at his partner after the birth of the child.
I spoke to Dunn for her top five tips on how not to hate your partner after kids.
1. Let him screw up.
A friend of mine recently said of her husband and newborn girl, “He would have taken a bullet for this child, but he might have forgotten to put a hat on her.” Remember this social media channel? He doesn’t have that, and if you don’t let him learn, you are participating in “mothering control” or not allowing him to participate in the minute details of childcare.
He, too, must be connected with his children, and you must allow him to make mistakes. This means that you are not hovering or signaling, explicitly or implicitly, that you are better off. “Full immersion is the only way,” says Dunn. “Leave the house. Have a coffee or leave for the weekend. His path is not wrong.” (I recently learned that my sweaty husband, when he struggles to get the kids out the door, does not help, raise his eyebrows and say “classic mistake – always wear your coat last. ”) If both partners fail to take full responsibility, you will be trapped in the dynamics of the employer and the sullen teenager.
But what, you ask, if your husband doesn’t want to do housework? What if he’s happy with you making grocery lists and following pediatrician appointments, summer camps, play dates, and special laundry instructions? Then, says Dunn, you’ll have to learn …
2. Stay on your side.
You need to stand up for what you need or stay on your side . Such propaganda can mean losing his temper and screaming that he needs to get up off his ass and fold his underwear , or not, it’s not okay to take a long nap after a long hot shower after a long solo run all morning. or you can have a polite conversation and share chores around the house. And continue to have this polite conversation, weekly or monthly, as new responsibilities appear and others disappear. (Goodbye diapers, hello baseball camp.)
Dunn suggests splitting the chores based on who loves or hates what to do – her own husband hates the grocery store (“crowds, fluorescent lighting, and I like seeing new foods and thinking about what I’m going to cook”). so food shopping became her responsibility. He is obsessively punctual, so he is responsible for everything that depends on time, for example, paying bills and taking his daughter to school.
Not staying on your side means stewing in quiet rage while you wash the dishes, bathe the kids, pack meals and fold the laundry – while your spouse reads the magazine in bed. It means thinking of things as a choice: “Do you want to wash your bathtub or dishes?” and then after that: “Do you want to fold your laundry or pack your meals?”
This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to dictate exactly how to do the housework – my husband prefers to collect meals and do the dishes in the morning, so if I don’t want to do it myself … they wait until tomorrow.
3. Insist on half a day.
Dunn tells me that “the weekend shouldn’t be a forced march” of childcare and housework. “You need to agree on a time for the weekend and ask each other, ‘What are we doing this weekend to meet the needs of everyone? “” She calls this the “everybody wins” strategy.
My husband and I agreed long ago that each of us would get half a day every weekend during which we can sleep without any childcare or housework responsibilities. Even if we are all at home, one of the parents is not at work. When my children inevitably ask me if they can have a snack / watch TV / set fire to something, I say, “Dad is in charge until lunchtime,” and they pass on their requests to him. (Answers: yes , yes , depending on what it is .) I read in bed, or go for a run, or meet a friend for coffee, without any comment from him. He watches the Braves lose five games in a row, with a few comments from me (“How are you relaxing?”). It is blissful.
4. Have sex during taekwondo.
Who has the energy for sex when you hit the mudflow? Many young mothers believe that sex is just another requirement of their time and body, and it is often easier to say, “Not today honey, I have a long line at Netflix.” Dunn cites research that claims that the marital sweet spot for frequency of intercourse is once a week, and that the ideal duration of intercourse is 7-13 minutes (insert the standard note here that intercourse is certainly not the only one way to have sex.). It really isn’t that much time – and if you, as Dunn did, ask your husband to take a break from the evening routine and put the kids to bed a little earlier, it won’t hurt your precious, precious, bedtime.
For others, scheduling sex is the only way to make sure it actually happens. Dunn tells me about a friend who has a constant sexual date with her husband while their twins are at Saturday morning taekwondo (this is a hiatus activity, I guess). My own husband, once defeated by the ruthless demands of a child and a preschooler, desperately said, “We’ll have to start paying for sex.” When I asked him to clarify, he said: “We need to hire a nanny to take them out of the house for a few hours, otherwise we will never have sex again.” There is nothing better than paying for babysitting services so you can use your time productively!
And good sex means you’ll want to have more sex, so, so to speak, overcoming that first hurdle will make you more eager to do it again. (The disclaimer that no one should have sex against their will is just advice on how to find time and cheer up.)
5. Learn to fight honestly.
“Know that [your fights] affect your child,” Dunn says. “If you fight over her head with multiple choice gestures, she gets these stressful responses. We were in a demand-refusal pattern, in which one partner tries to get the other to do something or participate and communicate, and the other just cuts out. Relationship gurus John and Julie Gottman call this an obstacle , and it is one of the main predictors of divorce. (Um, maybe because it pisses me off .)
Dunn and her husband went to marital therapy – and even consulted with an FBI crisis negotiator – to learn how to fight honestly and stay away from their daughter. They learned techniques such as “mirroring,” where a person repeats what the other person has just said and paraphrases the essence of their complaint. She said: “And sometimes you have to laugh because the paraphrasing is wildly untrue -“ You’re angry because I walked around you while you were emptying the dishwasher ”-“ No , I’m angry because you were standing there, jingling the keys and saying , let’s go instead of offering help. “
For her part, Dunn had to learn to control her temperament, which the therapist said was abusive, and ask directly for help rather than falling into a cycle of rage when her husband could not read her mind.
“How Not to Hate Your Husband After Children” is extremely useful and even comforting, if only for the reason that you realize that many couples are facing the same programs and conflicts as you – and have managed to break through them.
“We’re only one or two generations away from the housewife / breadwinner model,” she says. Each pair must re-invent what works for them – the strict feminist model requires a 50-50 split, but Dunn claims that he “seems equal” to each pair.
And Dunn points out as we say that her book won’t necessarily help a marriage that is truly distant. All of her research-based advice is based on the belief that both sides are good people who want everyone to be happy – obviously not for abusive relationships, or even women who are married. with partners who watch great football. weekend, while their wives clean up, cook and chauffeur.
“A lot of people have come up to me [since the book came out] and said, ‘It’s too late! I already hate my husband! “She says. Her standard response is: “Therapy, both conjugal and individual, has really helped me – and maybe it can help you.” For me, she continues, “and perhaps it will help this person get out of marriage – ask yourself:” Why do I allow myself to treat me like this? ” Towards the end of her book, she cites a comment from sociologist Scott Coltrane: “One of the biggest shifts in recent years is that many women simply won’t put up with partners who don’t contribute at home.”
We can’t do anything about the landslide. We cannot necessarily do something with the gender-role programs that we received in childhood (and continue to receive). But we can stop and talk about who takes the kids to hockey and who pays the bills. We can have sex during taekwondo. We can be sure that everyone will benefit. And here’s how not to hate your husband after children.