Darby Saxbe

This was true for my husband and I. Like, you go from being fun time friends who can go catch a movie or go out to eat to, like, you're running a small business.

And your product is the care and feeding of your baby.

Is the most important product of all time.

Right?

But you have to strategize and trade off.

And in the middle of the night, maybe neither of you feels like getting up.

There is so much more of a breeding ground for conflict when you're both tired, you're both kind of figuring out these new identities.

You don't really have the same opportunities for fun.

So it is a real challenge for a lot of couples.

Yeah.

And you're like, how can I screw this up?

This is like just when my husband and I got to a place where our kids were older and could take care of themselves, we started getting pets.

So I talk about there's one study where they looked at adoptive parents and it was gay male couples who had adopted a baby and then they compared them to heterosexual couples.

I think they were all biological parents.

Yeah, you had this adoptive sample.

And they had, in the heterosexual couples, like a primary caregiver and a secondary caregiver.

I think they basically treated mom as primary, dad as secondary.

And then in the gay male couples, they said, who's the primary caregiver, who's the secondary caregiver?

And what was cool was that the primary caregiver gay male dads looked just like moms, if you looked at their brain responses to baby.

Mm-hmm.