Why are we arguing so much since having a baby?

What our arguments looked like

A mistake, then anger about it, then defending the mistake, then a back-and-forth, then making up later and agreeing calmly on exactly what we'd have agreed in the first five minutes.

The thing one of us eventually wanted was to be able to say, in the moment: please don't be angry — let's talk about this. Rather than getting defensive and fighting back. Because the calm conversation always happened eventually, just two hours later and after considerable damage.

Ours were about bottles, timings, who did what, whether something had been done properly. None of them were about those things.

They were about being depleted, and about the load not feeling even. That's what makes them unresolvable on their own terms — you can settle the bottle question and have the same argument about something else within three days, because the actual input hasn't changed.

The subject is often not the problem

Worth looking at, because it was a live one for us.

When one person feels they're always the one at fault, two things are usually happening at once. One is real — the mistakes may genuinely be concentrated, often because one person is doing more of a particular kind of task and more tasks means more errors. The other is that the pattern of blame has become the habit, and both people are now reading neutral events through it.

Nothing decided late at night, when both of you are wrecked, is accurate or fair. We stopped keeping score, and that helped far more than it should have.

The conversations that actually changed anything happened in daylight, not during a flare, and usually not about a specific incident. Reviewing how the week had gone, out loud, once, was better than addressing each thing as it arose.

Talk in daylight, not at 3am

Everything above is about ordinary conflict between two exhausted people who are on the same side.

If you're being made to feel frightened, controlled, or unable to make decisions — if the arguments involve threats, or you're changing your behaviour to avoid someone's anger — that is a different situation and none of the advice here applies to it. Tell someone outside the relationship: a doctor, a midwife or health visitor, a friend. Those conversations are had more often than you'd think and you'll be taken seriously.