Last week, my husband and I celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary on a sunset cruise in Hawaii.
As we toasted with plastic glasses of prosecco, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a while: lightness. For the first time all week, we weren’t Mom and Dad. We were just us.
We were on our family “vacation” and had snuck away for a few hours (shoutout to my husband Mike for booking the cruise and to my in-laws for watching the girls).
As the catamaran pulled away from shore, the captain collected our bags, including our cell phones. There was no longer an option to check the baby monitor. I didn’t need to worry about taking anyone potty or acquiring a snack every 15 minutes. I could fully relax and turn my attention to the person sitting next to me.
Looking at my husband, I remembered how much fun we used to have together before kids.
Thirteen years ago, when we first started dating, we spent a week sailing the Mediterranean with a dozen close friends on Yacht Week. It was the epitome of life before kids - fun, carefree, spontaneous.
Even when that vacation ended and we went back to work at our private equity jobs, we still only had to worry about ourselves. We worked long hours and cared deeply about our careers, but work was the only major demand on our time. Whatever time and energy we had left belonged to us.
At the time, those intense finance jobs felt all-consuming. In hindsight, life was remarkably simple. What I didn’t appreciate then was how much space we had for each other.
Everyone made such a big deal about how our relationship would change when we got married. And in some ways, it did - it was the first time we were finally living together in the same city after doing long distance for five years. Things felt more official and more settled when we tied the knot. But the transition from being a couple to becoming a family felt far more life-altering.
Nobody really talks about how having kids changes the partnership from being a couple to becoming a family unit. There is a lot of joy in having a baby, yes, but also a profound sense of responsibility. Raising a little human, keeping them alive, then nurturing them and supporting them as they grow into themselves, takes time and attention that used to go toward the relationship.
And in those first few months with a newborn, nearly everything feels urgent. The baby constantly needs to be fed, changed into a new diaper, put down for a nap. Everyone is sleep deprived, tempers are short. Life feels unpredictable as you’re adapting to new transitions every week.
For us, having kids didn’t mean either of us stopped pouring energy into our careers. Mike was building a company, and I was gunning for the next promotion at Pinterest. We both still wanted the big job; we just had new, more important priorities competing for the same finite amount of time.
For parents raising kids together, it’s natural for each person to fight to claim back some time for themselves - exercise, friends, hobbies, anything that makes you feel like you. But after all that, there is often little left over for the partnership. Date night becomes just another thing to plan, and you’re both exhausted.
Between raising kids, building careers, and struggling to maintain some semblance of alone time, where does the marriage fit in? It often comes last.
It’s easy to get lost in the logistics of raising a family. You’re coordinating with your partner all day - who’s doing daycare dropoff, what are we eating for dinner, who’s putting away the dishes. But you’re not actually connecting.
Even at family meals, it’s hard to have a deep conversation. Someone wants to sit on your lap or is throwing food on the floor or needs more water. As long as there is a child in the vicinity, you’re still half distracted. By the time the kids are finally asleep, you’re both so drained you just want to throw on Netflix and zone out.
Over time, you start to feel like roommates or coworkers, two ships passing in the night. On the weekends, you’re passing the baby back and forth like hot potato so the other person can get a break. You become so focused on managing the increasingly complex enterprise of the household that the relationship gets whatever is left over.
And the longer this goes on, the easier it is to drift. You fight more about little things. Resentment builds over who is doing more. You stop sharing as much with each other.
The irony is that you are spending more time than ever with your partner, and yet you feel further apart.
For the first few years of life with kids, we focused a lot on building systems. Looking back, I think of those first years as Marriage 1.0.
We worked on getting aligned around our shared family vision, our parenting values and a fair division of labor. We set up better systems, invested in the right support and created new communication rhythms to stay in sync. We tried Fair Play, couples therapy and other tools to help us adapt as life kept changing and throwing new challenges at us.
All of those things helped. We got better at absorbing the inevitable sick kid or childcare cancellation without every disruption becoming an argument about whose career mattered more or who was already doing too much.
This work required many uncomfortable and difficult conversations, but it was necessary to get to a point where we could have the breathing room to feel like a couple again. It’s hard to feel connected to someone you resent or to prioritize romance when you’re arguing about fairness.
Marriage 1.0 was about figuring out how to make our life together work as a family. We became better partners, but that didn't automatically make us feel more like a couple. Now it feels like we’re entering Marriage 2.0, with more room for us.
As we’ve gotten to a place where responsibilities are visible and shared, with the right support around us, we don’t have to spend nearly as much energy fighting about logistics. And that has freed up more capacity to turn toward each other again. The work is less about how we run our life together and more about how we want to show up in our relationship.
We’re also getting to know the people we’ve each become after eight years of marriage, two kids, career changes, and plenty of hard seasons along the way.
We started noticing the roles and behaviors we’d inherited from our own parents and taking more responsibility for our own patterns. Instead of focusing on what the other person needs to do differently, we’ve spent the last few years working on ourselves and the kind of partner we each want to be (we both recently did the Hoffman Process).
Now, we try to assume best intent instead of keeping score. And with less energy spent trying to fix each other, we’ve been able to put more into connecting with each other.
I wish we’d gotten here sooner. But I’m also realizing that we couldn’t have skipped straight to this part. We needed to go through Marriage 1.0 before we could graduate to Marriage 2.0.
Now we have more time and energy for the parts of our relationship that had gotten crowded out. Lately, we’re doing more of the things we did before kids - going to a concert, taking a cooking class, seeing a Giants game. We’re intentionally making connection and romance a priority through daily conversations, weekly dates, and the occasional weekend away together.
And slowly, some of that lightness is coming back. We laugh more, have more fun together. We have conversations that aren’t about the kids or work or what needs to get done. After years of focusing so much on building our family, we’re making more space for us within it.
The sunset cruise was one of those moments. For a few hours on that boat in Hawaii, with nowhere to rush to and no one else to take care of, there was nothing to manage or figure out. We got to simply enjoy each other again.
Namaste,
Tamara
PS - This is a big part of the work we do in my group coaching program, The Rise Collective. We build the systems and alignment that create more room for your career, your kids, yourself, and your relationship. If you’re in the thick of this season, you can learn more about The Rise Collective here.
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