My husband and I learned how to be a couple again after becoming parents

Dear Delyara, After our second child, my husband and I became an efficient management team and almost nothing else. Who buys nappies, who collects daycare, who gets up first, whose turn to cook. Sex became rare. Conversation became logistics. We both felt rejected and exhausted. Counselling helped us stop treating intimacy as something that should return automatically once the baby slept. We scheduled time together, which felt deeply unromantic until it worked. We learned to say when we were touched-out, lonely, resentful, interested, frightened. We rebuilt physical closeness without demanding every affectionate moment lead to sex. Last night, after the children finally slept, we sat on the kitchen floor eating ice cream from the container because neither of us wanted to wash bowls. We talked for forty minutes about absolutely nothing parental. Love did not return as fireworks. It returned as recognizing the person beside me before asking what task they were responsible for next.