You two run the house better than you ever have. The couple is the one thing in it nobody was assigned to.
Somewhere in the last few months the two of you got very good at this. The handoffs are clean. She knows when the last feed was without checking and you know which cry means pick him up and which one means give it thirty seconds. It's the tightest operation either of you has ever run. It's also been a while since you looked at her and felt anything other than relief that she was handling it.
Somebody left this under one of my ads:
... "you saying you needed to find a way to rekindle the romance after the baby interrupted everything"
Interrupted is the right word for it. Not ended and not broken. Something that was running got cut off partway through, and nobody has had a free hand since.
Everything in your house has an owner now. The nights have an owner. The bottles, the laundry, the pediatrician's number, the thing that has to be ordered before Thursday. Some of it is split and some of it fell to whichever one of you was marginally better at it the first week, and then stayed there, because renegotiating it every day would cost energy neither of you has.
The two of you as a couple are the only thing in the house nobody was assigned to. It has no feed schedule, nobody wakes up for it, and it never cries. So it waits. That's not a character problem in either of you. It's what happens when every unit of attention in a house has already been spoken for.
Matthew Kelly makes a point in The Seven Levels of Intimacy that fits this season better than it fits most: energy, not time, is the scarce resource. Two people can have the same twenty-four hours and get completely different amounts of life out of them. That's his assertion rather than a study, and I'd hold it as a way of looking at your week. But it explains why the advice you've been given ("find time for each other") has been useless. You have found time. You spent it lying down.
So whatever gets the two of you back has to be small enough to survive an evening like that, and already picked, so neither of you has to invent it. That sizing is the whole reason Date Nights Dancing runs fifteen minutes at a time instead of an evening at a time.
If the drift has been going on longer than the baby has, and coordinating was already most of what the two of you did together, the roommate pattern is the wider version of the same thing.
Your instinct might be to file this whole feeling under selfish and put it away. Both of you are spending everything you've got, most of it at hours nobody should be awake for, and asking for her attention on top of that can feel like billing an account you know is overdrawn.
Kelly separates legitimate needs from wants, and puts closeness in the first category. His line is that you can survive without it and you cannot thrive without it, and that when a legitimate need goes unmet for a long stretch, people get irritable, restless, and discontented without ever connecting the two things. Again, that's his position and not a finding, but it's a useful one to hold if the two of you have been snapping at each other over things that don't deserve it. The snapping might not be about the dishwasher.
Missing your wife isn't a demand you're making on her. It's the reason you're reading this at all, and it's better to have it than not.
The honest instinct is to sit her down and tell her all of it. I'd hold off on that one, at least as the opening move.
A conversation about the state of the marriage is work, and it's work you'd be asking her to do at ten at night with the monitor on. It also asks the two of you to describe how things are going using nothing but the most depleted months either of you has had, and neither of you is a fair witness right now. And it hands her a question she has to answer well.
The same goes for the other version guys reach for, which is the big plan: the weekend away, the reservation, the surprise that takes six weeks of logistics. Anything that requires her to arrange childcare, pick a date, pack a bag, or have an opinion about a menu is a task wearing a bow. She has enough tasks.
So the first move has to be one where she does nothing but be there.
One customer wrote this:
So I bought these DVDs a few months ago and my boyfriend I just haven’t gotten around to trying it.. These past few weeks have been rough. and seems like all we’ve been doing is fighting and arguing... We decided to pop this DVD in and give it a try earlier this evening, and let me tell you... We were dancing, laughing and smooching in a matter of minutes... Literally minutes!!.. We just had a baby 10 months ago so we honestly haven’t had much of a connection lately.. Until now... He made me feel giddy again!! Like the first time we met!! Thank you so so much for making these!!
Chip and Dan Heath tell a story in The Power of Moments about teachers at a badly rated school who visited their students' families at home before the year started. They were forbidden to bring any paper with them, so all they could do was ask questions and listen. One hour, inside a school year of more than twelve hundred hours, and every number the school was tracking moved: conference attendance, truancy, reading, math. Their reading of it is that a relationship does not deepen in even increments, and that one hour where somebody feels genuinely listened to can outweigh an enormous quantity of ordinary time.
Your last few months have been ordinary time. That's not a verdict on them, and it doesn't take a few good months to answer it.
The evening in that message was a dance program in a living room, and it's my program, so weigh it accordingly. It's the same thing the Date Nights Dancing program is: easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you learning it together from the first video on, no studio and no experience needed. It fits between a bath and a bedtime, and neither of you has to be any good at it for the laughing part to work.
Every one of these is picked by you, set up by you, and started by you. Her whole job is to be in the room.
The kitchen fifteen. After the baby goes down, put music on in the kitchen and don't announce it as an occasion. Dance badly, or don't dance at all and just stand there with her while something plays. Fifteen minutes, then it's over and nobody has to process it. It works because neither of you has to produce anything.
Bring back exactly one thing from before. Not a new tradition. The takeout you always got, the show the two of you watched at the start, the drive you used to take on a Sunday. You already know it works, so it costs zero invention, and it puts the two of you back in a room you both remember being happy in. If you want more options sized for people with nothing left in the tank, the low-energy ideas are built for exactly that.
Touch with nothing attached to it. A hand on her back while she's at the sink, five seconds, and then you go back to what you were doing. Right now a lot of touch can read as the opening of a negotiation, and if every time you reach for her she has to work out what it's asking for, she may start bracing for it. Touch that expects nothing is how that stops. Anything past that is hers to say, and I'm not going to guess at it.
Everything on this page is written for drift: two people who still like each other and got squeezed out of each other's week.
If what you're seeing in her, or in yourself, is heavier than tired and it isn't lifting, that's a conversation for a doctor or a counselor rather than a date night. I'm not qualified to tell you where that line sits, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Getting somebody qualified involved is not a bigger deal than it needs to be.
Somebody bought the program as a gift and sent it with this:
Getting out to go dancing as new parents sure does get tricky, so hopefully we can have fun dancing at home. I’ll never stop dancing with my loving wife!
The handoff schedule loosens. The two of you get whole evenings back. The roles that hardened in month one stop being law. What you're doing between now and then is keeping the couple on the list of things somebody in the house is responsible for, and right now the somebody is you, because you're the one who noticed.
If it's the logistics stopping you (no sitter, no window, a baby with opinions about being put down), or if the question on your mind is the physical side of this season, both of those are in the date night with a newborn in the house piece, written for the same weeks.
You noticed the drift while you were still in the middle of it, which is a lot harder than noticing it afterward, and you went looking for something you could do that wouldn't cost her anything. That instinct is the right one and it's most of the work. The handoffs got clean because somebody in the house made them their job. This is the same skill, aimed at the two of you instead of at the baby.
The Thursday reminder over 100,000 couples love: ideas and conversation starters that deepen love, laughter, and intimacy.
