Thank you. As first time parents, my spouse and I are currently feeling the fire from under us, and need to remind ourselves to put it out, together.
I wonder what thirty six questions will make a couple fall in love _again_?
I wonder what thirty six questions will make a couple fall in love _again_?
That has turned out to be very good advice. Every now and then one of us will have a moment, we'll say something contemptuous, and the other will call it out immediately. Because we both had that understanding, right off the bat, it's like this escape hatch to conflict that cuts things off before they become hurtful.
Keeping "the spark alive" I think is difficult with kids. Really, you need quality time alone together, which becomes very hard to get. I think to some degree one of the important things beyond the "no contempt" rule is to remember that one of the greatest gifts you can give your child is a healthy and loving family, and in that you can start to find a new respect for your partner as the fellow parent of your child. There can be a really special camaraderie where you're "in it together" doing this difficult job of raising a young child.
It does get easier as the kids get bigger. 9-18 months is pretty difficult, but it's partially offset because after age 1 they start being so much more interesting, and by 2 the personality is really developed and a lot of fun.
It's hard, but worth it. Hang in there!
Merging the child rearing culture from two families is often a source of friction. Personally I think a lot of that is over things that don't matter as children are pretty adaptable.
And yeah it usually gets progressively easier after kids get to school age.
first year was the easiest with both - the only real difficulty was the sleep deprivation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/style/36-questions-that-l...
I once translated these to Dutch and made a "nested" slide deck of these using reveal.js so I could display these large and nicely on a smartphone and could navigate them by swiping. I put the slideshow on my webserver and printed and the QR code to the domain on an index card. Then I took my girlfriend, who is now my wife, on a date to a nice restaurant and gave her the index card.
We knew each other for quite some time but that night we got to know each other even better. It was a lovely night.