We think of children as giving meaning to marriage yet, on balance, research shows, children have an overall detrimental effect on its quality. In the worst-case scenario, where a child has a physical or mental illness, the marriage breakdown rate is 50 per cent. The biological imperative and social pressure towards parenthood is irresistible for 95 per cent of couples. Fulfilling this destiny is an earth-shattering experience which few of us are realistically prepared for. Mother feels exhausted, anxious, overwhelmed and very possibly clinically depressed - especially if she is expected to work outside the home while also caring for a baby. Father feels emotionally abandoned and jealous of the baby. Ironically, the couple who had hoped to bind themselves closer to one another by creating a new life find that the fulfilment of their wish causes them to lose that very sense of couplehood. Baby rules.
Sex is the first casualty, partly for the simple reason that the chronic fatigue that results from caring for a newborn is a turn-off. But while tiredness is a convenient excuse, there may well be more to it.
"As well as the delight of parenthood comes the shock when the first child is born of `I used to be the daughter - now I am the mother', so there is huge ambivalence in feelings about self. Sexual identity is lost initially as the new mother gives herself totally to the baby," says Yvonne Jacobson, psychosexual counsellor with the Marriage and Relationships Counselling Service in Dublin.
The new father may be out of sync with his partner's identity crisis. "Physically recovering from childbirth can take a long time, and the female's sexual feelings may be very slow to return - causing frustration for the male partner, who has more than likely recovered from the shock of parenthood and, having probably not taken more than a few days' paternity leave, has been continuing to work and so hasn't lost his original identity while coming to terms with fatherhood," says Jacobson. Add to this the further challenge of the loss of self-esteem, which can occur during the early years of parenthood and which, if severe, can negatively affect the parents' sexual relationship. A further layer of tension comes from the new responsibilities of parenthood, which can be hard to come to terms with.
"This can cause imbalance in the relationship - leading to a power struggle over who does what. Any resentment or anger felt by either partner can have an effect on sexual appetite and/or performance - causing tension in the bedroom, often expressed through avoidance of sex," says Jacobson.
Most marriages begin with a honeymoon facade of equality: usually both partners work outside the home and share major decisions about finances, housing, holidays and so on. However, the reality remains a fundamentally patriarchal institution which, once children arrive, becomes more and more balanced in favour of the male.
"Marriage is an oppressive conceptual framework for women because it maintains the relationships of domination and subordination. We are living in a patriarchal system in which men and women do not come equally to marriage. And it is with the birth of the first child, that the new mother runs into the patriarchal wall at 100 miles per hour. And this reality hits home and puts what is known as `strain on the marriage'," says Gail Grossman Freyne, psychotherapist with the Family Therapy and Counselling Centre in Ranelagh, Dublin.
Women today are still marrying men who are taller, smarter and have greater income because, in Grossman Freyne's view, women have been "socially constructed" to be vulnerable during pregnancy and motherhood and therefore need male protectors.
"In this way, men are controlling what they cannot do, which is reproduce. This is why there is no good childcare, because as long as there is none, women are kept out of the male arena. This social construction has been internalised, so that women actually believe that a good woman should be a good mother, and a good mother should stay home and look after the children. There is nothing wrong with that belief; the problem is that it is not mutual and not reciprocal. In other words, the man does not have this belief that a parent should stay home and mind children as part of his masculine identity. The typical father's understanding of caring - however generous and genuine he is about it - is to do what he was taught and to bring home the bacon," says Freyne.
Most mothers of young children will tell you how overwhelmed they feel by their responsibilities and how they feel torn between their children and their careers. They also feel torn between their husbands, who often feel neglected, and their children. "The woman gets put in a double bind, because the social construct is that `a good woman nurtures and cares for the child'. Yet if she does that, her husband goes around moaning `what about me?'," suggests Grossman Freyne. "That double bind gets manifested in lots of ways," she adds. "Men frequently say that they `babysat' their children so that their wives could go out. This is a way of saying that they are taking only temporary responsibility, which means that the father has the deeply ingrained belief that parenting is fundamentally the mother's job," she says. "Research at One Plus One in the UK has found that fathers tend to overestimate their own contribution to domestic responsibilities and to underestimate that of their wives."
This dialectic has been "naturalised", in her view, so that we now accept it as a fact that "men are from Mars and women are from Venus" - to quote a bestseller which has capitalised on this perceived male/female divide. "That is when you get the logic of domination that assumes that superiority justifies subordination, so we are naturally different and women naturally belong in the private sphere and men naturally belong in the public sphere. And that's why you get things like Article 42 of the Constitution, which sets out that women's place in the home. Or the Catholic church's view that `women have a special nature'," says Freyne.
THE ultimate irony in all of this is that it is care for children that keeps a lot of marriages going. "A lot of people say to me that they would separate if they did not have children," says Freyne. "And that is not necessarily a bad thing."
By gluing parents together through the bad times, children can keep marriages going long enough for parents to rediscover their joy in each other. And with more and more men discovering the joys of parenting and questioning the rigidity of male roles, we may be moving towards the discovery that it is not children that put the marriage under strain, but the way we socially construct mothers' and fathers' roles in parenting.
