Everybody’s piling on this dude but he’s only observing a physiological reality. Men don’t automatically bond with their babies like women do because men don’t carry them inside their bodies. Women have a 40-week advantage to get to know their babies, build a relationship with them, adapt to their life cycles. Men don’t have that. They often don’t have anything like the powerful release of hormones that women experience when giving birth. Every woman who has given birth knows what it feels like. It’s a transformational experience.
After a baby is born, women derive an enormous amount of tactile contact from their relationship with the baby. The father, in the meantime, has his tactile needs that used to be satisfied by his wife largely unmet. What would we have him do? Breastfeed? Quit his job and cuddle the baby all day? Some people are more tactile than others. What if a dude is very tactile and suddenly his only source of tactile comfort has gone away? What is he supposed to do?
The guy who posted the question was called every name in the book but he was only saying what many people know. The male and the female experience of early parenthood is completely different. We are doing ourselves no favors by pretending that it isn’t happening.
Clarissa's Blog 
I completely agree. How do you think civilized people should think about and deal with this issue ?
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I think it would help if people knew about it and it wasn’t such a surprise. It would also help if we didn’t see it as a moral issue but as a simple physiological fact. Then people could talk about it in advance and wouldn’t be baffled by what’s happening. Simply understanding what the other person is going through and why would already change their attitude.
There’s a lot of resentment that’s created when a young mother sees that the father doesn’t respond to the baby like she does. But he’s not doing it because he’s evil or uncaring. He simply hasn’t had the time to get there.
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I agree that it would be great if people knew about this. But couldn’t the father educate himself about what women experience after they give birth?
I’m also very suspicious about him saying “baby is easy”. Is it because his wife is doing most of the work?
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Couldn’t the woman educate herself on what men experience?
He’s at least trying to find an answer. There’s no evidence that she is.
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Does he mean sexual relations by “being intimate”?
She may be incapable of them at all for the first 8 weeks after giving birth.
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There are many ways to be intimate without PiV.
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It does need to be talked about, but part of that discussion has got to be: yeah, this time is difficult, and sometimes stuff happens and you are out of luck for a while, unless your wife has an adequate support network: are her relatives helping her out? Are you going to hire a mother’s helper?
Because there are a lot of other postpartum things that may or may not happen to mothers, that are surprisingly common, which I had never bloody heard of before they happened to me: prolapse, hernia, anemia, pubic symphisis dysfunction. And when people say “colic” they make it sound like the baby is unreasonably fussy in the evenings. With my first kid, he was unreasonably fussy 24 hours a day, and for the first three months, I never got more than 45 minutes of sleep at a time, and this was causing me to hallucinate. Also, my blood sugar was vacillating wildly– 33 in the morning, 206 in the evening.
It was kind of like living in a war zone, and yeah it sucked for our relationship. We got through it. It was a team effort. Nobody but the baby was getting any personal needs met. We look back on it like: Yeah, that was a thing we survived. Maybe it’s a reasonable ask, if the mother had a normal birth and no postpartum complications, reasonably family/community support, and the baby is fine, and things are going well. But there has also got to be room for when mom is physiologically trashed, baby is screaming unconsolably every 1.5hours and must then be nursed for half an hour until he passes out, and then it takes 15 minutes for mom to calm down and sleep, and then we do it all over again in 45 minutes… Sometimes it’s just a bad thing we all have to get through.
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fwiw, the next two kids things were very much the same, just minus the horrific colic. 3 kid was baptized at 8 weeks old, and I almost fainted at the baptism, because I still couldn’t stand upright for more than about 8 minutes at a time. That’s not normal, but… since we don’t talk about these things, it is impossible to get a sense of how not-normal it really is. How often does this happen? Is it
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Sigh. Some days are bad edit days.
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Plot twist!
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