Relationship satisfaction after a baby: how big the drop is, and who escapes it

This is you, and Miva, your partner. You both work, you have a daughter of five and a baby, and you live in a small flat. Every weekday evening is the same race: dinner, bath, bedtime, dishes.

At ten, the flat is quiet at last. You sit at the kitchen table, too tired to talk. You both love the children. Still, as a couple, you feel a little further apart than before they came.

You are far from alone. One team followed 218 couples through the first eight years of marriage. In the couples who had a first baby, how happy they said they were as a couple dropped suddenly, right at the birth. Researchers call it relationship satisfaction. It did not climb back in the years that followed.

The couples with no child got less happy too, only slowly, year after year. So the baby did not start the slide. It added a sudden step to a slope most couples are on anyway.

And that is an average, not a rule. In another study, two out of three new mothers felt less happy with their marriage in the years after the baby. One in three felt as happy as before, or happier. Over the same years, half of the wives with no child felt less happy too.

What did the mothers who stayed happy have in common? The researchers had interviewed these couples as newlyweds, before the baby came. In those couples, the husband spoke of his wife with fondness, and both partners knew each other well and paid attention to their marriage.

Fondness, and knowing each other well: on a busy evening, both have to fit into tiny moments. Years ago, researchers turned a small flat into a lab, put cameras on its walls, and watched those moments one by one.