There is a moment that happens in many marriages after children arrive when two people finally find themselves alone together and discover they have absolutely no idea what to do with the opportunity. The children are asleep, or at Grandma’s, or occupied somewhere that does not currently require adult intervention. The kitchen is mostly clean. Nobody is asking for a snack. Nobody has yelled “Mom!” from a room containing another fully capable parent. The couple sits down, looks at each other, and for the first time all day there is silence.
“So,” one of them says. “What do you want to do?”
The other thinks for a moment.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you want to watch?”
“I don’t care.”
Twenty minutes later, they are still scrolling through streaming options while one person checks a school email and the other remembers that somebody needs new soccer cleats. Eventually they choose a movie neither particularly wanted, one spouse falls asleep seventeen minutes in, and the evening ends with someone whispering, “Are you awake?” to a person who clearly has not been awake since the opening credits.
This is not necessarily evidence of a marriage in trouble. It may simply be evidence that two people have children.
Parenthood can fill a home with enormous amounts of love while simultaneously consuming astonishing amounts of time, attention, energy, sleep, privacy, money, and spontaneous conversation. You can be deeply grateful for your family and still occasionally look at the person beside you and think, I miss you. Not because they went anywhere, exactly. They may be six feet away packing lunches. You just miss the part of your relationship that once had enough open space for the two of you to exist without immediately discussing somebody else’s needs.
That feeling can be surprisingly difficult for good parents to admit because it sounds, if phrased badly, like regret. But “I miss us” does not mean “I wish we didn’t have them.” Those are entirely different sentences. It is possible to love the family you created and also notice that the marriage inside that family needs attention too.
You Did Not Stop Loving Each Other. You Got Very, Very Busy.
Before children, couples can spend an almost irresponsible amount of time talking about things that have no practical value whatsoever. They discuss movies, dreams, people they know, places they want to travel, strange thoughts they had in the shower, whether a hot dog technically qualifies as a sandwich, and stories from work that could probably have been summarized in ninety seconds but somehow require twenty minutes.
Then children arrive, and conversation becomes impressively efficient.
“Did she eat?”
“What time is practice?”
“Did you email the teacher?”
“He needs a bath.”
“Can you pick them up Thursday?”
“We’re out of milk.”
“Did you sign the form?”
“What form?”
“The form.”
This is how two people who once stayed up until 1:00 a.m. learning everything about each other can eventually spend an entire Tuesday functioning as competent colleagues in a small, chaotic organization. Nobody intentionally decided that the marriage should become administrative. The family simply generated more administration than anyone anticipated.
Researchers have been studying this transition for decades because it really does change the structure of couple life. A meta-analysis examining 37 studies that followed couples from pregnancy into the first year of parenthood found small average declines in relationship satisfaction for both men and women, although couples varied considerably and comparable declines also occurred among some couples who did not become parents. In other words, parenthood should not be treated as an automatic marital disaster, but it is a substantial life transition that asks couples to reorganize time, roles, expectations, and attention.
That nuance matters. Children are not the problem. Life becoming fuller, more demanding, and less flexible can create pressure that reaches the marriage unless couples learn how to adjust together.
One of the Strange Things About Parenting Is That You Can Be Together All Day and Barely See Each Other
Parents often spend enormous amounts of time in the same physical spaces while having very little couple time.
Saturday morning might include breakfast, laundry, a birthday party, soccer, grocery shopping, somebody crying because the wrong socks were selected, lunch in the car, a hardware-store stop, three loads of laundry, another sporting event, dinner, baths, bedtime, and a kitchen that appears to have hosted a minor convention. Husband and wife were technically together for much of the day. They may have exchanged hundreds of words.
Very few of those words were about each other.
That distinction between family time and couple time is easy to miss because family time can be wonderful. Sitting at your child’s game together matters. Going to the zoo matters. Eating dinner as a family matters. Laughing while your toddler wears a bowl as a hat absolutely counts as shared joy. But the fact that two parents are enjoying their children together does not automatically mean their romantic friendship is being fed.
Research on leisure during the transition to parenthood illustrates part of this shift. In a longitudinal study of 147 dual-earner couples, both partners experienced an immediate decline in shared and individual leisure after becoming parents. Shared leisure was also connected with aspects of later marital quality, including love and conflict, although the patterns were nuanced rather than simply “more leisure equals better marriage.”
The practical point is not that parents need to recreate their pre-child schedule. That would be difficult unless the children are willing to begin managing themselves, and current evidence suggests a five-year-old remains unreliable with insurance paperwork. The point is that the marriage needs some experiences that belong to the couple rather than exclusively to the family.
Missing Your Spouse Does Not Mean You Are Failing as a Parent
Some parents carry unnecessary guilt about wanting time away from their children. They adore the kids, so they wonder whether date nights, weekends away, closed bedroom doors, or even sitting on the porch alone together somehow communicate that the children are a burden.
They do not have to.
Parents remain people after becoming parents. They still need friendship, rest, adult conversation, affection, privacy, play, sexuality, and moments when nobody cuts someone else’s food into smaller pieces. Protecting some room for the marriage does not require withdrawing love from the children.
In fact, family relationships do not exist in isolated compartments. Researchers often describe families as interconnected systems because what happens in one relationship can spill into another. Studies have linked couple interaction patterns and relationship quality with aspects of parenting and parent-child relationships, although these effects are complex and should not be reduced to “happy marriage equals perfect children.”
There is therefore no need to place “being good parents” on one side of a competition and “having a good marriage” on the other. The marriage is part of the family. Caring for it is not leaving the family behind.
The harder question is usually not whether parents believe their marriage matters. Most do. The question is what that belief looks like on Wednesday at 8:47 p.m. when everybody is tired and somebody has just discovered that tomorrow is “dress like your favorite historical figure” day.
Parenting Turns Spouses Into Coworkers Because There Is So Much Work to Do
There is a reason couples can begin sounding like project managers after children arrive: parenting involves an extraordinary amount of project management.
Food has to appear repeatedly. Clothes must somehow remain roughly the correct size. Schools communicate with the frequency of organizations that have recently discovered email. Medical appointments exist. Sports schedules multiply. Birthday gifts must be purchased for children you have never met. Someone has to know where the vaccination record is. Someone must remember that Wednesday is library day, Friday requires a water bottle, and the field trip form is due on the same day every printer in America senses urgency and stops working.
When that labor becomes uneven—or even simply feels uneven—the loss of connection may not be solved by telling a couple to have more date nights. Exhaustion and resentment are remarkably poor appetizers for romance.
Parenting stress can spill into couple functioning, and research on dyadic coping—how partners communicate about and manage stress together—suggests that the way couples handle external pressures matters for relationship quality. Studies of parents facing particularly high parenting demands have found associations between greater parenting stress and lower couple satisfaction, with patterns of coping between partners playing an important role.
That gives “I miss us” another possible meaning. Sometimes it means, “We need more fun.” Sometimes it means, “I am exhausted and I need to feel like you are standing beside me in this.”
Before booking the babysitter, it may be worth asking whether both people feel supported in the ordinary work of family life. A spouse who is drowning in responsibilities may not experience “Want to go out Friday?” as romance. They may experience it as another event requiring an outfit, childcare coordination, feeding instructions, and preparation for Saturday morning.
Sometimes the most romantic sentence available is, “I’ve got bedtime. Go sit down.”
You Are Allowed to Miss the People You Were Before Everybody Needed You
Parenthood changes identity. You become somebody’s mother or father, often with an intensity that is difficult to understand before it happens. Suddenly another person’s temperature can determine your entire emotional state. You know which cup is acceptable, which stuffed animal prevents sleep-related negotiations, and precisely how much silence from the other room should cause concern.
That identity can be beautiful. It can also become enormous.
A woman may spend all day being needed at work and then come home to be needed by children. A man may move from employee to coach to homework helper to bedtime negotiator without noticing that he has not had a thought unrelated to responsibility since breakfast. Both may eventually feel less like the people who fell in love and more like highly trained service providers.
Sometimes when spouses say they miss each other, they are also saying, “I miss who I am when I am with you.”
That matters.
Your spouse may be one of the few people who remembers you before you became “Mom” or “Dad.” They remember the ridiculous trip, the terrible apartment, what you wanted to become, what you used to find funny, the music you played before children began requesting the same song fourteen times, and the version of you who could leave the house carrying nothing but a wallet and keys.
Reconnection can involve becoming curious about that person again. What are you thinking about lately? What is difficult right now that has nothing to do with parenting? What are you looking forward to? What do you miss? What has changed in you? What do you want more of in this season?
Parents ask children questions constantly.
“How was school?”
“What happened?”
“Why are you wet?”
“Where are your shoes?”
It is worth occasionally directing some curiosity toward the adult you married.
Stop Waiting for the Perfect Date Night
Date night has excellent public relations.
It is often presented as though marriages can remain wonderfully connected if couples simply arrange childcare, put on respectable clothing, locate a restaurant with flattering lighting, and remember not to discuss the children.
Date nights can be great. Go on them.
But they are not the only legitimate form of connection, and for some seasons they are difficult. Babysitters are expensive. Babies have opinions about separation. Work schedules are complicated. Children get sick precisely when reservations become nonrefundable. Parents of children with disabilities or significant medical needs may have even fewer caregiving options. A couple can also spend $140 on dinner, arrive home exhausted, and wonder why romance did not automatically emerge with the appetizer.
The larger principle is protected couple attention, not compliance with the date-night industry.
Sometimes that is dinner out. Sometimes it is sitting outside after bedtime with two drinks and no phones. It may be a walk around the neighborhood while the older child watches the younger ones. It may be coffee on Saturday morning before the household wakes. It may be twenty minutes on the couch when both spouses agree not to discuss logistics unless something is literally on fire.
Research on shared leisure suggests that enjoyable time together can matter to couple functioning, but that does not mean every meaningful interaction needs to be elaborate or expensive. What couples often need is a regular reminder that they still enjoy being together when they are not accomplishing a task.
Target can technically be a date if both of you are enjoying yourselves.
It becomes less convincing when one person is comparing laundry detergent prices and the other disappears into electronics for thirty-seven minutes.
Tiny Time Still Counts
One of the biggest traps in busy family life is assuming that connection only counts when there is enough time to do it properly.
“We haven’t had a date in weeks.”
“We need a weekend away.”
“We’ll reconnect when soccer season ends.”
“We’ll have more time when the baby sleeps.”
“We’ll have more time when they start school.”
“We’ll have more time when the activities calm down.”
Parents eventually discover that activities do not calm down. They evolve.
Diapers become homework. Homework becomes sports. Sports become driving. Driving becomes college applications. Eventually the children leave home and begin calling with questions about insurance.
Waiting for life to become completely uncluttered is therefore a risky marriage strategy.
This is where small rituals matter. Ten minutes after bedtime. Coffee before the day begins. A hug in the kitchen that lasts long enough to register. Sitting together during practice instead of automatically dividing into separate phones. A short walk. A message during the afternoon that contains something other than, “Can you get milk?” Asking one real question after the children are asleep and actually staying for the answer.
None of these replaces deeper time together.
But tiny connection keeps the relationship from surviving entirely on special occasions.
A marriage needs some ordinary Tuesdays too.
Be Careful When Every Conversation About “Us” Sounds Like Another Complaint
Sometimes one spouse notices the drift before the other.
“We never spend time together anymore.”
“You’re always tired.”
“We haven’t gone anywhere in months.”
“All we talk about is the kids.”
The concern may be completely legitimate. Unfortunately, when reconnection is introduced primarily through criticism, the other spouse can hear something very different: You are failing me in yet another area.
This is especially painful if that spouse already feels stretched to the limit.
A softer version might sound like, “I know life is full right now, but I miss you,” or, “I don’t need anything huge. I just feel like we’ve been running the family together and I want a little time where we get to be us.”
Those sentences invite rather than prosecute.
There is also room to acknowledge reality. Maybe one spouse is working nights. Maybe there is a newborn. Maybe somebody is caring for an aging parent. Maybe a child is going through a difficult season. Maybe there genuinely is less available relational energy than either person would prefer.
The goal should not be to make a hard season feel like a marital failure.
Some seasons require couples to love each other with lowered expectations and increased generosity. Reconnection might be smaller for a while. That is different from deciding it no longer matters.
Sometimes What You Miss Is Fun
Parenting can make couples incredibly serious.
There is always something responsible to do. Something needs cleaning, scheduling, purchasing, repairing, signing, charging, washing, packing, checking, or discussing. Even “family fun” can require enough preparation to qualify as event production.
Meanwhile, the couple’s old playfulness can quietly disappear.
Remember when you used to make each other laugh for no reason? When somebody could suggest ice cream at 9:30 p.m. and the plan did not require car seats, pajamas, negotiations, or a strategic assessment of how sugar might affect bedtime?
That version of spontaneity changes with children, but play does not have to disappear with it.
Put music on while cleaning the kitchen. Send the stupid meme. Tease each other kindly. Play a game after bedtime. Sit on the porch and invent wildly inaccurate backstories for the neighbors’ dogs. Flirt while making lunches. Dance badly enough that your teenager asks you both to stop.
Shared leisure research across the transition to parenthood found that couples’ leisure tends to decline after a baby arrives, and the authors argued that shared leisure remains relevant to marital functioning during this period. The point is not that parents need constant entertainment. It is that a marriage made entirely of responsibilities can eventually feel like a workplace.
You are allowed to be ridiculous in your own house.
The children already know you are embarrassing.
There is very little left to lose.
And Yes, Sometimes What You Miss Is Sex
Children have historically demonstrated poor respect for romantic timing.
A couple may finally have privacy and immediately hear footsteps in the hallway. Someone needs water. Someone had a dream. Someone remembered a question that apparently cannot survive until sunrise. A teenager may possess the extraordinary ability to remain in their bedroom for six consecutive hours and then enter the kitchen at the precise moment their parents attempt affection.
Physical intimacy can also become harder because exhaustion is real. Bodies change. Hormones change. Privacy changes. Nursing, pregnancy recovery, work stress, sleep deprivation, medications, body image, and the experience of being touched by small humans all day can change how a person experiences desire.
That does not mean sex no longer matters. It means couples may need more conversation and less assumption.
We explored this more deeply in We Love Each Other. So Why Does Sex Feel So Complicated?, but the parenting version deserves its own acknowledgement: sometimes “I miss us” includes missing being lovers rather than simply co-parents.
That can be said without pressure.
“I miss being close to you.”
“I miss touching you without one of us listening for the baby.”
“I know we’re exhausted. I just don’t want this part of us to disappear.”
Those are different from keeping score.
Intimacy is much easier to protect when both people experience it as something they are caring for together rather than another unmet obligation waiting at the end of an already impossible day.
You Do Not Need to Pretend the Kids Are Not There
Some advice tells parents that date nights should have one rule: do not talk about the children.
That seems ambitious.
These are the people you created together. They consume significant emotional and logistical bandwidth. Sometimes the funniest story from your entire week involves something your six-year-old said in the grocery store. You are allowed to talk about your children while connecting as a couple.
The issue is not whether the kids enter the conversation.
It is whether they occupy every room in it.
Talk about the funny thing your daughter said, and then ask how your spouse is doing at work. Discuss the teacher email, and then tell them something you have been thinking about lately. Celebrate your son’s game, and then talk about where the two of you would like to travel someday.
The goal is not to temporarily pretend you are not parents.
It is to remember you are not only parents.
That distinction can become especially important as children grow older. The more independent they become, the more obvious it may become whether a couple has continued building a relationship with each other or spent twenty years standing side by side looking primarily toward the children.
The empty nest should not require introductions.
Protecting “Us” May Require Asking for Help
Modern parents sometimes operate as though needing help is evidence that they have poorly configured their family.
It is not.
Human beings have raised children in networks of relatives, friends, neighbors, communities, and extended support for a very long time. Yet many couples now try to function as two adults doing paid work, childcare, household management, transportation, emotional support, education coordination, social planning, health management, and relationship maintenance while occasionally wondering why everyone seems tired.
If trustworthy help is available, use it.
Let Grandma take the kids.
Trade babysitting with friends.
Let your sister host the sleepover.
Pay the babysitter when the budget allows.
Ask the older teenager whether they would like to earn twenty dollars while you walk around the neighborhood together.
Sometimes couples will spend hundreds of dollars maintaining vehicles and hesitate to spend money creating a little breathing room for the people driving them.
Not every family has nearby support, financial flexibility, or safe caregiving options, so “just get a babysitter” is not universal advice. For some couples, connection will have to be built creatively inside the home for a season. But where support exists, accepting it can be an investment in the family rather than an escape from it.
Parents need villages partly because spouses occasionally need to remember each other.
Let Your Children See That You Actually Like Each Other
There is something lovely about children growing up knowing that their parents have a relationship that does not revolve entirely around them.
They see Mom and Dad laughing in the kitchen. They hear, “We’re going out tonight.” They watch one parent kiss the other goodbye. They learn that sometimes the parents are talking and interruption can wait. They understand that the family contains multiple relationships worth treating with care.
This should never mean making children responsible for the marriage or creating insecurity around parental attention. A child should not feel that they are competing with the spouse for love.
It simply means that a healthy family does not require every ounce of adult attention to orbit the children at all times.
Research on families supports the broader idea that couple functioning and parent-child functioning are interconnected rather than completely separate domains. The lesson is not that parents must perform a perfect marriage for their children. Children do not need theater. They need a home where relationships can be imperfect and still cared for.
Sometimes that looks like affection.
Sometimes it looks like repair.
Sometimes it looks like hearing, “Your dad and I are going to sit outside for a little while. Unless somebody is bleeding, please give us twenty minutes.”
Children are remarkably capable of producing urgent questions nineteen minutes into such arrangements.
Progress is still progress.
You May Not Get the Old “Us” Back—and That Is Not Necessarily Bad
Couples sometimes talk about reconnection as though the goal is to recover exactly what they had before children.
But you are not the same people.
You have been changed by loving and raising other human beings. You have probably seen your spouse do things you never saw while dating: soothe a feverish child at 3:00 a.m., carry a sleeping toddler from the car, advocate at school, coach a team, pack a lunch while joining a conference call, cry at a recital, or somehow remove vomit from a car seat without abandoning the vehicle entirely.
There is a deeper history between you now.
The goal is not to become the twenty-seven-year-olds who could leave for dinner without discussing who packed the diaper bag.
The goal is to discover who these versions of you are together.
That may require mourning some things. Spontaneity really does become harder. Energy really does change. Privacy can become a luxury product. The marriage may never again look exactly like it did when Saturday morning contained no sports schedules and nobody entered the bedroom asking where their blue shirt was.
But something else can grow in its place: a friendship with more history, affection with more evidence behind it, inside jokes built from years nobody else witnessed, and the peculiar intimacy of looking across a chaotic kitchen at the person who has survived all of this with you.
That is worth getting to know too.
Do Not Wait Until You Feel Distant Enough to Deserve Reconnection
Couples often wait for obvious disconnection before they take the marriage seriously. They assume attention is necessary only once they are fighting constantly, barely talking, or genuinely worried about the relationship.
But most marital drift is less dramatic.
It looks like postponement.
“We’ll plan something next month.”
“We’re just busy right now.”
“This season is crazy.”
“We’re okay.”
And perhaps you are okay.
That is exactly why small attention matters now.
You do not have to wait until the marriage is starving to feed it.
Maybe tonight you sit together for fifteen minutes after the house becomes quiet. Maybe tomorrow you text something that has nothing to do with scheduling. Maybe this weekend you take a walk. Maybe you put something on the calendar two weeks from now and defend it with the same determination normally reserved for children’s activities.
Most importantly, become curious again.
Not because your spouse has become a stranger, but because they have continued becoming a person while both of you were busy raising people.
Ask what has been weighing on them.
Ask what has been making them laugh.
Ask what they want more of.
Ask what they miss.
And perhaps ask the question underneath this entire article:
“Do you ever miss us?”
The answer may be yes.
That is not an accusation against your family.
It may simply be an invitation back toward each other.
You can love the noise, the children climbing into your bed, the practices, the school pictures, the tiny shoes that somehow end up everywhere, the terrible knock-knock jokes, and the life you built together. You can know that someday you will miss this season more than you currently understand.
And while you are loving all of it, you are still allowed to look across the room at your spouse and miss them too.
The children are part of your love story.
They do not have to become the end of it.
Sources & Further Reading
Danielle M. Mitnick, Richard E. Heyman, and Amy M. Smith Slep, Changes in Relationship Satisfaction Across the Transition to Parenthood: A Meta-Analysis, Journal of Family Psychology (2009). The meta-analysis synthesized 37 prospective studies of first-time parents and found small average declines in relationship satisfaction during the first year after birth, while also emphasizing substantial variability and evidence that some declines may reflect broader relationship trajectories rather than parenthood alone.
Amy Claxton and Maureen Perry-Jenkins, No Fun Anymore: Leisure and Marital Quality Across the Transition to Parenthood, Journal of Marriage and Family (2008). In 147 dual-earner couples, shared and independent leisure declined after childbirth, and patterns of shared leisure were associated with aspects of later marital love and conflict.
Research on dyadic coping in parents has examined how parenting stress can spill into couple relationships and how partners’ ways of communicating and coping with stress together relate to relationship satisfaction. These studies include families facing elevated parenting demands, so their findings should not be treated as direct estimates for every family, but they reinforce the broader importance of approaching external stress as a couple rather than allowing it to become conflict between partners.
Family-systems research has also examined spillover between couple relationships and parent-child relationships, supporting the broader view that these family relationships are interconnected rather than operating entirely independently.