Quality of the Intimate and Sexual Relationship in First-Time Parents Six Months After Delivery‪.‬

Sexuality is one part of the intimate relationship of couples, and the factors that affect the experience of a couple's intimate relationship are complex, especially when the couple enters parenthood. Belsky (1981) described a triad of components affecting the members of the new family: the parenthood, the intimate relationship and the health and development of the child. There is a high divorce and separation rate among the parents of small children in Sweden that peaks when the first child is one and a half years old (Statistics Sweden, 2003). The intimate relationship of first-time parents has been studied somewhat in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. The purpose of the present study was to describe the quality of the intimate relationship of Swedish first-time parents six months after the birth of their child. An intimate relationship often changes over time (Belsky, 1985). In a longitudinal study of 186 married couples, Kurdek (1998) found that marital satisfaction decreased over four years, with the steepest drop between years one and two. During a ten-year period, Kurdek (1999) found that marital quality declined fairly rapidly over the first four years, then stabilized, and then declined again in about the eighth year of marriage. However, in this sample of 93 couples, after ten years of marriage, only 52 couples were living with their biological children, whose mean age was a low 3.84 years, meaning preschool children. Kurdek (1999) suggests that "it would be of interest to determine whether marital quality stabilizes or even increases when children become more autonomous" (p. 1295). Kurdek (1999) also found that the husbands and wives living with their biological children started on lower levels of marital quality at one year of marriage and experienced steeper declines in marital quality than couples without children or living with stepchildren. Lewis (1988) found that healthy emotional relationships before parenthood continued to function well after the first child was born, but "low competent" relationships deteriorated.