Pregnancy And Healthy Relationships Challenges

Pregnancy is a good time to work on nurturing healthy relationships. Strengthening your relationship now can help you manage the transition to the joys and challenges of parenthood.

Pregnant women’s feelings and healthy relationships

When you’re pregnant, the hormones that zing around your body can cause lots of emotional ups and downs. You’re also adjusting to a major change in your life, so it isn’t surprising if you and your partner are feeling emotional. There are physical changes too, which affect how well you feel and how you feel about your body.
If you’re an expectant mum, you might feel:

• more vulnerable and tired than usual and in need of extra support
• more interested and involved in the pregnancy than your partner
• less – or more – interested in sex than you used to.

You might discover that your partner doesn’t feel the connection with the unborn baby as strongly as you do. If this is a concern for you, it might help to know that this often changes as pregnancy progresses. As your baby makes its presence felt – with kicks and movements and a growing bump – your partner will probably get more interested.
If you and your partner feel differently about the pregnancy, it can affect your relationship. But it’s likely your feelings will become more alike as you move through different stages of the pregnancy.

Pregnancy experiences that can affect relationships

You and your partner might feel really excited about the birth of your baby. But it’s common for you to go through some strains in your relationship because of the changes that pregnancy brings.
Here are some things that often impact on pregnant couples’ relationships:

• The shift in focus to include another person in your relationship might cause some tension between you.
• Either you or your partner might be worried about having a child – for example, you might be worried about the timing of the pregnancy, its effect on your career or the loss of your independence.
• You or your partner might worry about how you’ll manage financially once the baby is born.
• There might be a mismatch between your desire for sex.
• A woman’s changing shape and feelings about herself might affect her partner.

These feelings and experiences are new for both of you, so it’s normal for you to sometimes feel confused and unsure about what’s going on with your partner. If you can talk together openly about how you feel – good and bad – and what you expect, it can help to clear up misunderstandings, strengthen your relationship and avoid disappointments and conflict.

Practical tips for healthy relationships during pregnancy

Pregnancy is a time for nurturing relationships, because of the emotional and physical changes that you’re both going through and the new roles that you’re thinking about.
Here are some practical tips to help you nurture healthy relationships in pregnancy:

• Talk to each other about how you both feel about being pregnant and what’s to come – both the positives and negatives. Try to talk in a way that explains your views rather than blames your partner.
• Listen to each other without judgment or defensiveness. 
• Talk about practicalities such as how you’ll make time for yourself and time for your partner and how you’ll share household tasks now and after the baby is born.
• Talk about your hopes and dreams for your family and what rituals and traditions are important to you both.
• Talk about your individual parenting styles. If your styles turn out to be different, you might need to work on solving problems together with negotiation and compromise. 
• Be open and honest about your sexual needs to avoid misunderstandings. 
• Go to antenatal classes together. Some hospitals and birth centres also run birth classes for dads. 
• Consider getting some help with managing your money if you’re worried about the cost of having a baby.

Communicating with your partner is a skill that takes time, patience and practice. If you’re experiencing a lot of difficulties or arguments during pregnancy, relationships counselling might help improve your communication.