Babies Can Make Your Marriage Stronger

Babies

add something amazing to your life once they arrive. They bring a different kind of love, so amazing in its newness and overwhelming in its enormity that many mothers (and fathers, too!) forget the love that brought them to baby in the first place. Many parents find their relationship stressed and changed after baby for good reason.

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Babies are all-consuming. Actress Sarah Jessica Parker spoke to this truth in a very real way. She told the UK Telegraph just how hard her 14-year marriage and 20-year relationship with husband Matthew Broderick has become. She said:

Kids can really distract you from your relationship. Maybe in good ways and bad ways. It's important to have all eyes on all parts of the relationship. We've been together for 20 years and you have good days, you have decent days, and you have bad days. That's a marriage. That's a relationship. That's a friendship, even -- relationships outside the marriage run the same course. If you're in it for the long haul and you want meaningful relationships, you are going to go through lots of different periods.

She is so, so right. Too many people have babies too quickly in their relationships and quickly discover they didn't know one another well enough to raise a baby together. Even more, they haven't seen the seasons relationships go through. Ideally, people would be together at least five years before even considering a baby together.

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The fact is, relationships are up and down and parenting together adds a huge challenge. Suddenly everything about the way he was raised versus the way you were raised is called into question, and you find you don't agree on things and everything changes. It doesn't have to be a bad thing, of course.

If you view it as an opportunity to know one another better and learn about each other's childhoods, then it's a good thing. But not everyone can manage that. Marriages go through good and bad times, and you have to have the faith to hang on in the bad times to get through to more good times.

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Babies change things, but they can change it for the better. It's all about perspective and faith in the relationship.

Did your baby change your relationship?

Written by Sasha Brown-Worsham on CafeMom's blog, The Stir.

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