I Let Romance Die (Temporarily) To Save My Marriage

Before having kids, I thought that a healthy marriage would always prioritize dates and intimacy, even during the early parenting years. But after becoming parents to triplets, I realized that sometimes, the healthiest way to protect a marriage is to stop trying to always date your spouse.

My wife and I have an unusual story, so in hindsight, it shouldn’t have surprised me that we’d be comfortable with our marriage evolving into, well, an unusual marriage. We were both pregnant at the same time and have pseudo triplets (twins and a singleton, a month apart), whom we coparent with their biological dad, Trow.

Let me just tell you: the sleep deprivation from triplets was obscene. They had a variety of health issues that caused them to awake between 20 and 50 times a night in the first year, and they needed help resettling… every. single. time. We were breastfeeding the triplets together, so we were both constantly touched-out.

When survival mode took over

At first, we were far too exhausted to even think about date nights. Once we got our feet under us a bit, my wife and I realized that pressuring date nights, planning sex schedules and doing performative intimacy wasn't strengthening our relationship; it was exhausting us.

What saved our marriage was accepting a season of partnership over passion. We became teammates, logistical co-managers of the chaos of early childhood, and, yes, roommates. We even began sleeping in separate rooms to best maximize sleep. By now, I haven’t slept in the same bed with my wife in two years.

Before kids, I thought sex was important enough to a relationship that it should be scheduled if it wasn’t happening frequently on its own. Now, when my wife and I are intimate, I crack a joke about “cleaning out the cobwebs” because it’s been so long since the last time. Counter-intuitively, this honesty deepened our connection more than scheduled romance ever did.

The pressure to be sexy

There’s such a cultural pressure on parents, especially mothers, to do it all: to nurture children, maintain desire, and preserve a pre-parenthood identity, to “bounce back,” no matter how difficult the pregnancy or birth, and to be a sexy being and a caring mother, all at the same time. This ignores the realities of caregiving labour. It’s common for breastfeeding hormones to suppress the sex drive, and sleep deprivation definitely affects libido for all parents, regardless of breastfeeding status.

In the early motherhood Facebook groups I’m in, the parents (almost exclusively women) are constantly posting about the stress they experience regarding the pressure (from society or from their spouse) of needing to be a sexy partner for their spouse after a day of being tugged and pulled and cried on, at the constant beck and call of little kids. The posts often make me wince over how desperately the mothers just want to be left alone at the end of the day, or feel like their only choice is to either neglect their partner’s needs or their own.

Why the roommate phase worked for us

Through frequent discussions, my wife and I felt like entering a roommate phase of our marriage would help save it. And my ultimate goal is to make sure our marriage survives these early childhood years. I know other twin and triplet parents whose marriages didn’t survive. Ironically, entering a roommate phase in my marriage with Jess helped enable non-roommate moments. Removing the pressure of romance with my wife freed up my emotional well-being to engage in romantic moments when it felt good. Weeks would go by where we wouldn’t have kissed each other, and then the kids would start sleeping just a teeny bit better, and suddenly weeks would go by where we were giving goodnight kisses every night.

Romance, intimacy, and relationships don’t need to be dead during these years. But they are changing—and necessarily so. No parent goes unchanged when they cross the threshold from a child-free life to a child-filled one. I certainly didn’t. This was possibly the biggest life change I’ve ever experienced. Letting stereotypical ideas of romance go quiet for a period of time in my wedding was an act of commitment to the relationship, not a failure.