Husbands Who Leave Once The Baby Arrives

This post is about the experience of losing your husband after your baby is born. Why does this happen in some marriages? What is the psychology of a man who abandons his wife at the point where she gives birth to their child?

This is not a pretty love life issue and there are real people out there who are suffering from this critical love life problem. Reason enough to set our sights on understanding why it happens.

Some men marry expecting that the “bond” that exists between them and their wives will never change. They expect that the “single woman” they married will be the “wife” they are now living with pretty much throughout their marriage.

For the beginning of most marriages this can appear to be the case or nearly so. But getting pregnant changes the formula. For starters, there are obvious changes in the physical appearance of the woman. That shapely, sexy presentation shifts now in the direct of pregnant soon to be expecting mother of infant. Preoccupied with the soon to change role she will have. If that “bond” I mentioned a moment ago is based solely or mostly on “looks” there is bound to be trouble ahead.

From there, things get even more difficult when the third member of the family shows up. Now its a threesome, no longer a twosome, and the bond has been altered for life. Finding a way back to the twosome has a chance of happening only after our little addition to the family grows a pair of big legs (wings?) and moves on to have his or her own separated life.

The marital problems start to show up when feelings manifest as competition for “mother’s/wife’s love” and the different forms of pathological jealously that can show up between an insecure father, his wife now mother, and son or daughter. By the way, this particular problem is difficult to get at since most men feeling this kind of insecurity rarely admit it. The fear is that it looks ‘weak” and leaves them feeling a bit too vulnerable.

The feeling that usually manages to surface instead is some combination of anger, frustration, and distance usually blamed on something the mother’s doing wrong, etc. When these feelings are also directed at the child the situation is understandably even more critical. Unfortunately there are some men who remain in this kind of family situation chronically angry, potentially or actually abusive. A larger percentage, hit the road.

For them, the guiding feeling is they need more than they have to give. Over the years a few of these guys have privately told me they left in order to protect the mother and the child from what they knew was unhealthy in themselves. Ironically, an act of love disguised as a self-interested abandonment and irresponsibility. Go figure…..

Comments? Welcome. Dr. T. Jordan