A Baby Ruins Everything

Men run away from a relationship when a baby comes.

Children Ruin Relationships. Facts. Don’t argue with me.

I’m no stranger to broken homes. Growing up it felt like a 60/40 split in favour of broken homes. It might be more, if I included the number of marriages that existed on paper, but not in reality. Like most men, I always promised that would never be me. How can a man abandon his flesh and blood, his family? What a coward. I couldn’t understand it—until my first child completely turned my relationship on its head.

It’s like you’ve spent years putting together a perfect 1,000-piece puzzle, and then some grubby baby comes and sits in the middle of it. Now the pieces are all over the place, and you have to find a way to rebuild it all. Men don’t run away from relationships when babies come; the relationship runs away from them.

Your relationship will never look the same after a baby. It’s no longer a safe place to hide away from the world. You have this little human to protect. The family transitions from a two-man team to a full scale army, doing nursery and hospital runs, juggling survival and children’s parties. The marriage becomes a fortress. You are part-time lover and part-time carer. Baby mode is hard mode — no, expert mode. Everything goes out the window; it’s a crash course. The relationship between the partners doesn’t hit like it used to.

The people involved in the relationship change, they adapt, and some even leave (except one has to stay—for the sake of the child, one always stays). Men don’t carry the same baggage of children as women. We can drop that package and move on whenever it’s convenient. Add together a postpartum mother and an unpredictable newborn, and it’s a a scramble to get out as quickly as possible.

‘A man can’t love his child if he doesn’t love the mother of the child,’ a woman says.

Very few man have ever qualified that statement.

A woman says, ‘If the mother is not happy, the child is not happy.’

Says who?

Women often assume that a man’s role as a father is directly tied to how he treats her. Men don’t see it like that. I always assumed the two went hand in hand, but I find layers of patience for my child that I could never find for my wife. Aside from the wicked men who try to spite the child to spite the mother, most men see their roles as a partner and father as separate. They believe leaving the relationship will not impact their parenthood. Some women agree and make it impossible for a man to be a father. I’ve never met a woman who says the happiness of her children is dependent on how the man feels.

I don’t know how a man can leave his offspring and start a new life, but I understand the temptation to be relieved of the pressure, the responsibility, and the uncertainty. Maybe he always wanted to leave, and now he has an excuse—the baby accelerated the process. I don’t know why men run away from the relationship, maybe they run away from the reality. It’s always hard to face reality in any context. It takes effort to rebuild the puzzle. Don’t expect the relationship to just change when the kids come along; be prepared to build a new one. Most of the time, people think it’s easier to start fresh with someone else.

The love doesn’t stop when the baby comes; it grows. The joys of a family can outweigh the joys of a relationship, if you can endure through the entry-level tests. The numerous graduation ceremonies are glorious — there is something empowering in building something fresh from the foundation of the old.

I never hesitate to give a silent nod to the brother pushing his pram into overpopulated coffee shops during the early morning rush hour. Of course, I rate the mothers, but men, we have a different struggle. The nod is a homage—a quick I feel you, brother. I know it’s tough, but hang in there, my G. This is the way we break the cycle.