When we were kids, my brother and I competed to be the favorite child. As adults, it became a running joke: which of us two did mommy like best?
Of course, it was an unanswerable question: love cannot be expressed or quantified in pounds and ounces.
At least that wasn’t the case until a recent study in Finland tried to do just that, and concluded that parental love is more important than romantic love.
Researchers measured brain activity when people were asked to think of stories involving love – for pets, partners, strangers, friends, nature and children – and love for your children turns out to trump romantic love.
But does it? Real?
Before them there was us, writes Anonymous. Without us there would be no them. And without a healthy, happy us, I don’t believe there can be a happy, healthy them.
I mean, we’ve all heard the clichés. The mothers who say that “you never really know love until you’ve had a baby”; the husbands who complain that their wives have fallen down the pecking order the moment they give birth. And now, apparently, there’s science to tell us it’s true.
Well, not from my perspective. And while it’s totally taboo to admit, I’m sure I’m not the only woman who feels this way. I don’t love my children more than I love my husband.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore my daughters, Holly, three, and Isabella, one, that’s for sure. And I’m a good mother to them. They want for nothing – emotionally or physically – and are happy, well-adjusted children.
But if I had to sum up my feelings for them in one word, it would not be ‘love’, but ‘duty’.
They are helpless, completely unable to take care of themselves and I have a responsibility towards them that I will never shirk, even though I sometimes don’t like it.
Now I’m the first to admit that this can change as they get older, but the early years of motherhood are undeniably a grind. When they’re little, your kids take from you and give very little back.
What are mine taking? In varying proportions: my time, my career, my freedom, my spontaneity, my body—once a svelte size 10, two pregnancies have left me with a baby bump that no amount of exercise or healthy eating seems to change—and, perhaps most pertinently, they’re taking me away from the love of my life, my husband, Nick.
Despite what others say, I do not believe this is the best for me, him, or our daughters.
Before them there was us. Without us there would be no them. And without a healthy, happy us, I don’t believe there can be a happy, healthy them.
We were together for six years before Holly came along. Six years where I felt like I was the luckiest woman in the world to have found this man who was my equal. He made me laugh, he challenged me, he shared my passions, my hopes and my dreams, he made me want to be the best version of myself that I could be.
He still does, or at least he would if we could actually spend some time together without having to talk about the logistics of childcare, potty training, and where in the house Isabella might have hidden one of her shoes.
Oddly enough, searching for lost shoes and cleaning the floor under a high chair do not appear in the parenting scenes that the Finnish researchers had their subjects imagine when they measured their feelings of love.
As I delve into the study, I find that the scientists’ scenes feel like pastiches of motherhood. The moment you first see your newborn, your child running toward you in a sunny meadow, your child graduating from high school, your child turning toward you and smiling.
The moment when your child screams for 45 minutes because he or she doesn’t want to be in the car is nowhere to be seen.
And that’s without even mentioning the tantrum where your child lies facedown on the floor because you put his milk in the wrong cup, the hour-long reading sessions with the same Julia Donaldson book (over and over again), and the daily struggle to get him to brush his teeth.
I can’t believe a parent can imagine such scenarios and still find the “love” neurons in their brain. Conversely, the scenarios that involved romantic love weren’t all candlelit dinners, although this one was in there.
They were everyday things, like watching your partner put on a shirt or load the washing machine.
The whole idea that your children should be the love of your life is so reductive. It plays into this tired patriarchal idea that a woman isn’t a woman until she’s a mother. Which I find so insulting.
What does this mean for people who, by choice or situation, are not parents?
I haven’t had a mother for a long time and I’ve always resented the patronizing rhetoric that told me I couldn’t truly understand love (or tiredness) until I had children. And honestly, I don’t think that’s true.
I also don’t think you can expect a love to last unless you put time and effort into the relationship.
That’s why I make sure we have a babysitter one night a week and go out together, even though I thought the idea of a “date night” was ridiculous before I had kids. It’s a way for us to remember the people we were before we were consumed by our daughters’ needs and wants.
I also want the girls to see what romantic love looks like.
I want to show them a relationship that is not a fairy tale, but aspirational. I want them to know that they don’t have to have children to experience true love.
Another important ambition: when our girls leave home, I still want to have a relationship that is based on more than co-parenting. Because what happens when you focus on your children for 18, 20 years at the expense of your partner?
Yes, one of the reasons I fell in love with Nick was because I thought he would be a good father – and he is – but I don’t want to spend our old age living a vicarious life through our children.
I want us to still be excited and inspired by each other. I want more of the years we spent traveling the world, sleeping in remote hotel rooms and exploring the culture and cuisine of historic cities.
I want to debate politics and discuss plays for hours over a bottle of wine. How can I ever hope for that when we lose ourselves in being just mother and father?
We will always love our children unconditionally, but they don’t have to be the only love story that defines the love in our lives.