Hel-lo, little one; bye-bye, sex. This one really is not solvable within the family. Desire hinges on spontaneity, on the unexpected, on the inventiveness of the partners, and it’s going to be reduced to almost nothing when you have a kid, let alone more than one. You’ll be first and foremost “Daddy” or “Mommy.” You’ll no longer exist in the first person. When you talk to the kid, you’ll say things like, “Mommy doesn’t agree that you should put snot on the picture, Elijah.” After a few years, you’ll see, you’ll become only “Daddy” and “Mommy.” And twenty or thirty years after that, you’ll be simply “Grandpa” and “Grandma.”
So does putting the children first really toll the couple’s final knell? Most of the time, yes. When you have children, you can no longer be a capricious young thing having fun with her girlfriends or arousing her lover. You are no longer the high-spirited young guy living like a bohemian, not caring about the state of your bank account at the end of the month. You may become “Grandpa” and “Grandma,” but not necessarily with each other. Statistically, your chances of growing old together are pretty small: raising kids will have exhausted them. You won’t have been able to hold on to enough for yourselves. He will see only the matron who looks after the house and the budget and the kids; you will see only an old man with disgusting love handles who tinkers around in his workshop on the weekend and occasionally cooks something. Cinderella is transformed into a maid, Prince Charming into a toad.
Watching other couples becoming parents and completely sinking into their roles, I naively believed that they had just allowed themselves to get trapped and that this would never happen to me. Wrong. It happened to me, too. I hardly ever look in the mirror any more, or wear high heels; I never take my contact lenses out of their case; I buy new clothes maybe once a year. My partner is above all the father of my children, and they’re pretty much all we talk about. When a man speaks to me at a dinner party, it never occurs to me that he might be flirting; if it does happen, months will pass before it dawns on me.
The result: in larger French cities, one out of every two couples gets divorced or separated, especially young couples. More and more couples are breaking up when the children are still very small: statistically, around the firstborn’s fourth birthday, or shortly after the second child’s, if they are a bit slow. To have sex, or to have children? It’s often the choice you’ll have to make.