Since our child arrived, we argue all the time. Will it get better?

Yes, for most couples it gets better again, and no, not by itself. What happens after the birth is not a sign that your relationship cannot hold. It is what happens when two exhausted people have to renegotiate their entire division of tasks, on the side, half asleep and without ever having talked about it.

This text is for the phase in which you wonder whether this is still you.

Why it almost always gets worse after the birth

There are three reasons, and none of them has much to do with you.

The buffer is gone. In a relationship without a child, there is breathing room. A bad evening is made good again at the weekend. With a baby there is no buffer any more. Every bit of irritability immediately meets the next bit of irritability, and nothing has time to settle.

Everything is renegotiated, without negotiating. Who gets up at night. Who carries on earning. Who decides when the doctor’s appointment is. Who is allowed to be tired. None of this is discussed. It takes shape in the first weeks out of chance and necessity, and then it holds for years.

Too little sleep changes how you talk to each other. With lack of sleep, the threshold at which a sentence lands as an attack drops, and it drops for both of you. You have the same conversations as before, except that now they land differently.

Taken together, this means: you are not arguing because something between you has broken. You are arguing because everything that used to cushion arguing has disappeared.

What is really behind it when you shout at each other

Almost every argument in this phase has the same core, even if it is never said out loud.

Both of you think: I am giving everything right now, and nobody sees it.

She thinks it because she carries the day, the nights, the appointments, the lists in her head. He thinks it because he is back at work, cannot talk about any of this there, and at home feels he never gets it right anyway.

Both of you are right. And because each of you is waiting for the other to say it first, neither of you says it.

That is why the most effective sentence in this phase is not “you do too little”. It is:

“I can see that you’re giving everything right now too.”

It costs little and changes a surprising amount, because it delivers the one thing you are both waiting for.

How long this lasts

The honest answer: for most couples, the acute phase lasts until the child sleeps through the night and one of you has a bit of room again. Often that is many months, sometimes longer.

But what really matters is not how long it lasts. It is whether you negotiate something during this time or just endure it.

Couples who negotiate come out of this phase as a team. Couples who just endure come out with a silent bill that gets opened years later. A great many relationship crises described as “we drifted apart” have their origin exactly here.

Three things that help now

1. Twenty minutes that are not about the child.

Not an evening, not a weekend, not a holiday. Twenty minutes.

The rule: nothing organisational. No appointments, no shopping lists, no arrangements. That is harder than it sounds, and that is exactly why it works.

2. A fixed time for everything organisational.

Everything you keep out of the twenty minutes needs another place. Ten minutes, once a week, always on the same day. Who does what, what is coming up, what didn’t work.

It sounds dry, and it stops your whole life together from turning into a list of arrangements.

3. Name what is happening.

“We’re not arguing because we don’t like each other any more. We’re arguing because we’re both at the end of our rope.”

A sentence like this takes away the meaning an argument would otherwise take on. Without it, at least one of you starts turning every night into a statement about the relationship.

How you can tell it is more than exhaustion

There is a point at which my advice is no longer enough.

When for weeks you have felt no joy, not even in calm moments. When you feel cut off from your child or from yourself. When you drag yourself through the day even though you have slept. When thoughts are there that frighten you.

Then it is not about your relationship. Then it is about you, and that belongs in good hands. Your midwife, your gynaecologist or your GP is the first port of call, and that is not a big step but a normal one.

The same applies to your partner, because fathers slip into phases like this too, and that is talked about even less.

And if there is violence in your relationship, physical or verbal, then exhaustion is no explanation for it. In Germany, the Violence against Women Support Hotline (Hilfetelefon Gewalt gegen Frauen) is available around the clock and free of charge on 116 016.

What I would like you to take with you

This phase is not the truth about your relationship. It is the hardest test a relationship gets, and it comes at the time when you have the least strength to pass it.

Something I often say and really mean: as parents, you don’t get everything right. Nobody does. It is not about doing this time well. It is about getting through it together without stopping talking to each other.

Start with twenty minutes.