What is your love like after children?
Love after children isn't softer. It's braver.
No one tells you this plainly enough after having kids:
The love you had before children is not the love that will carry you through after them.
The love before was built for freedom. For spontaneity. For the subtle assumption that time would always be generous.
It was a love that lived lightly in the body. You could stay in bed long past the sunrise, tracing familiar shapes on each other’s skin while the day ahead was waiting patiently outside the door. You could hop out for ice cream at 10 pm because the freezer was empty and the night felt open, no bags to pack, no one to arrange care for, no bed time routines. You could talk for hours without arriving anywhere, circling old memories, half-formed dreams, versions of yourselves you hadn’t tried on yet. Silence wasn’t something to fill it was something you rested inside together. You belonged wholly to each other in those moments, not divided by responsibility or anticipation. You could imagine yourselves endlessly becoming, because nothing was asking you to stay still.
The love after children is built for endurance.
It learns how to breathe under pressure. It is etched so deeply in your bones that it can tread through any season of life no matter how hard it gets. It has the kind of stamina that survives the one constant that many of us run away from — change.
After children, love stops being something that simply happens to you like a good day you fall into. It becomes something you practice. Its work. Real effort. Real work. Often when you are depleted. Often when the last thing you want is closeness and the only thing you want is silence or sleep.
It’s not a downgrade.
It’s a reckoning.
Parenthood will push you to the edges of your raw self, your personality, your identity, your patience. You are no longer loving each other at your best. You are loving each other while you are touched out, under resourced, hormonally altered, and especially in the beginning, letting go of old versions of yourselves you didn’t realize you already outgrown.
You begin to realize more and more that in your marriage, you are not just sharing lives, or bank accounts or homes… you are sharing each other’s nervous systems.
You begin to see how the other handles fear. Responsibility. Loss of control. You meet their childhood coping mechanisms. Their stress responses. Their tenderness and their edges. The 7 year old versions.
You see theirs and they see yours.
You stop meeting each other as lovers first.
You meet as two human beings becoming undone.
This is where the intensity may cause you to grow into a panic.
You may think something is wrong because suddenly the things that felt easy don’t feel easy any more. The desires don’t arrive on command anymore. The conversations become more logistical. The intimacy becomes more coordinated.
But what’s actually happening is more precise than that.
It’s that the fantasy we once had that mirrored the romantic dramas we watched in the movies…. dies. The one fueled by chemistry alone.
The one that believed love should always feel like being swept away off your feet.
And in it’s place, something sturdier is being born.
The love after kids is no longer lived lightly but it lives deeply. It is not performative.
It doesn’t care how it looks from the outside. It isn’t fueled by validation, admiration or applause.
It’s built from repetition.
From choosing each other again and again when there’s nothing to gain.
From staying present when your nervous system wants to escape.
From learning how to sit with the discomfort and in it together.
From learning how to resolve things in the ways you needed when you were children but were never shown.
Desire changes here too. It doesn’t disappear, it deepens. It becomes slower, it thickens. It becomes more responsive, less about being wanted and more about being felt. It becomes more meaningful and intentional.
You are no longer seduced by potential or what’s possible.
You are aroused by security and safety by the person who knows exactly how heavy your day was. He knows what kind of load you carried but still loves you the same. By the one who saw you crack open yet didn’t flinch. By the shared language forged through the trenches of ordinary days.
By the way you learn each other’s exhaustion; how you could tell by the set of a shoulder or the pause before a sentence when the other needs relief, not advice.
It’s walking through this fire together that transforms that old love into that new love. It’s mature, it’s deep, sexy, intimate, forgiving, playful, responsive, activating. It drives you. Inspires you.
And joy… real joy moves differently now.
It’s subtle, deep, palpable. More honest.
For me, it lives in the way my husband makes me hot tea in the morning when he hears me up coughing at night without asking. In the way he puts his palm on the small of my back when he walks by me while i’m cooking in the kitchen. In the looks we exchange over our sleeping baby or when our toddler does applies something we both taught her into action. In the way he shoulders unseen loads and house hold duties so my days can feel a little lighter.
Romance becomes less about escape and more about acknowledgment. Locking eyes across a messy kitchen island, sharing a laugh over something small and absurd, feeling chosen again and again in the middle of the ordinary. Conversations shortened but sharpened; dreams grew fewer but heavier with meaning. Silence still existed, but now it came late at night, earned, sacred, wrapping around you like proof of survival.
This love will require more of you than the first one ever did.
It will require you to be more emotionally intelligent. To know how to read the room and anticipate each others needs. It will require accountability when you slip or make mistakes (because you will). It will require courage to grow instead of calculating moves and keeping score.
You no longer imagine yourselves endlessly becoming - you watched it happen in real time, through each other, through them. Love after kids has you stay in the hardest moments and to grow anyway. It’s fuller, braver, and more astonishing than the freedom that came before.
This kind of love gives something back that early love cannot:
A sense of being deeply known fully as you are.
A feeling of standing inside something that cannot and will not collapse the moment it’s tested.
This is not the love that sweeps you away.
It’s the love that stays.
And loving this deeply is something brave to do.
Because if you’re fully devoted with all of your heart,
love after children isn’t built to come and go, it’s built to last.
And that’s the kind of love I’m after.
Warmly,
