It’s hard to understand exactly how much having a child changes your life until you experience it for yourself. The people in your life who have already become parents can (and will) warn you about it all ahead of time: the way you’ll have to sacrifice your sleep, the limited time you get to spend on your favorite hobbies, and how it will truly test you and your partner in a way your relationship has never been tested before, no matter how solid.
My husband and I had known each other since high school and had been married for four years when our daughter was born in 2020, so we had gotten into a comfortable, happy routine of hanging out at home with the occasional date night here and there. Having a baby kills those date nights though — at least in the beginning — and that meant we had to find another way to get in that quality time.
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Now that our daughter is 3 years old, we’re finally coming out of the fog of those early years of parenthood.
But that doesn’t mean we’re not both exhausted — both mentally and physically — at the end of the day. We both have full-time jobs, and caring for a toddler is basically like having another full-time job. By the time she’s in bed and the dust has settled, we both end up pretty shell shocked, sitting on the couch and absorbing the silence. It’s not exactly a stage in our life where we feel like doing anything but staring at the TV on a weeknight.
We discovered an easy way to spend time together effortlessly.
Instead of pushing ourselves to expend even more energy on nights like these, we still get our quality post-bedtime routine time by engaging in a little something called “parallel play.”
The term is usually reserved for children and describes the way they play side by side but still independently, and that’s exactly what my husband and I do on these nights.
We each do our own thing but in the same room.
Sometimes that means I’m working on my latest Lego project while he works on his computer. Other times, he drags a spare TV into the living room to play a video game while I’m on the couch, working my way through a show on Netflix. We’re both spending our free time exactly how we want to while still getting to hang out together after what is almost always a truly hectic day.
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We get the proximity we crave without the pressure.
And it’s not like we’re ignoring each other, either — when one person gets up to grab a drink or a snack, they offer the same to the other one. We’ll send each other tweets or memes to chuckle at, and sometimes, he’ll stop to comment on something on the show I’m watching or I’ll ask how part of his game is going. We always chat about our days.
I would love to be able to say that every evening after our daughter goes to bed means that we put our phones away, give each other our undivided attention, and engage in meaningful conversation, but right now, that’s not our reality. The reality is that we’re both tired. This stage won’t last forever, but while it’s here, sometimes the mutual understanding that we’re both not going to be able to give 100% right now is actually what brings us closer together.
That doesn't mean we don't enjoy our date nights out.
We still enjoy going out and doing things without our daughter, just the two of us. A couple of weekends a year, we book a staycation at a nearby hotel and do all the things that just aren’t possible (or fun) to do with a toddler in tow. We go to soccer games, we go out to nice dinners, and we see movies when we can, and those nights are something I always look forward to.
But so are the nights when we’re both hanging out in the same room, doing our own thing. In the best of circumstances, marriage is going to last a long time, and accepting that you’re never going to have everything in common with your partner is key. He’s never going to love watching The Kardashians, and I’m never going to suddenly be interested in playing super-complicated PlayStation 5 games. But when we can do both, side by side, it doesn’t seem to matter much.
