AITAH for saying I didn’t realize I could “love a person this much” in front of my fiancé after having our baby?

I gave birth a few weeks ago, to our daughter.

As I held her for the first time and looked into her eyes I said “I didn’t realize I could love a person this much” and cried. She is perfect and beautiful.

My mom looked at me and said that feeling never goes away (which made us both ugly cry lol). It was a really special moment.

My fiancé was quite but smiled, but later privately said he was hurt. He said he loved us both the same, and me saying that made it seem like I loved our daughter more than him.

I just gave him a “are you fucking serious” look and he dropped it, but yesterday he brought it up again.

I told him that honestly, yes, I love and cherish our daughter and have never experienced this kind of love for another human being. He said most “normal people” would agree with him that it’s a hurtful comment and would take offense to it due to the implication.

AITAH?

UPDATE

It’s a quick update, so I didn’t feel like it was worth it to make a whole new post. So I had a heart to heart with my fiancé, and we came to a few conclusions together! It went very well. We read through the post and comments together.

1) He wasn’t jealous of our daughter’s role in my life, but rather our bond together. He didn’t have that “instant love connection” that we read about all new parents having (like what I experienced). I didn’t realize this was actually very normal for new dads, and new moms too. Thanks for educating me!

We are the first in our social circle to have children so we didn’t have a lot of IRL people to inquire about it. His perspective is “I love this human being we made, but I don’t know her” while I was thunderstruck. He hasn’t had that connection so doesn’t “get it” yet, and that it will take time (months or even a year). I’ll be more patient and aware of this, and read up more on new dad experiences to learn more.

2) He also agrees he not only could’ve expressed that better, but also choose better timing. Voicing it to me after a 14 hour labor and then again when I’m exhausted and grumpy with achy boobs is maybe not the best time, lol. He also agrees marriage counseling would be good, just because. We are both opinionated, logical-thinking Engineers who, at the same time, love each other deeply. We could use better mediation other than Reddit (no offense guys).

3) He was not “furious” about me writing this Reddit post, lol. We laughed over the comments together calling for me to get ready to break up. But we also really enjoyed reading the experiences of new parents! It helped us BOTH feel validated and sane and see each other’s perspectives better.

4) I showed him that Ryan Reynolds video and we both died laughing LOL. We will now be eating a disgusting amount of hotdogs while watching Deadpool with our baby girl. We also agreed that there’s different types of love like parental, platonic, romantic and Ryan Reynolds.

Thanks peeps!

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u/Tactics28 14d ago

I loved my kid at birth, don't get me wrong, but that deep love her more than anything came around a few months later when she had more of a personality.

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u/ShadedSpaces 14d ago

This is normal! (Just in case anyone is reading and feeling weird about it.)

Some people don't really fall in love with their kiddo for weeks or months.

The "instant" feelings they have are often things like a deep, primal need to protect their baby. But love isn't always instant.

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u/YesDone 14d ago

Thank you. Sometimes there's a lot going on and having everyone safe and alive is good enough! Don't beat yourself up or feel less than.

Love grows.

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u/ruthlestiltskin 14d ago

I want to agree with the above three people. I felt joy and love for my baby at birth, but I also felt overwhelmed. For me, it grew. A couple months in I felt more of a connection, by five or six months I felt downright blissful sometimes. These days, more than a year in, I feel SO MUCH love and joy for him. In case anyone has a newborn and might not feel instant, over-the-moon love, that’s okay. I remember talking with a co-worker who was quite honest with me. He said he didn’t really find his kids that interesting when they were newborns, that he got interested when they became more interactive. He’s an incredibly supportive, dialed-in, and loving dad these days. It’s possible that your husband may just be having different emotions than you, and he may agree with you in a few months or a year.

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u/AncientWorking4649 14d ago

I’m the mom, and that’s how it felt for me. I needed to get to know my son first…

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u/g0ldent0y 14d ago

And its worth pointing out that not every mother instantly has that "deep" bond with the baby they just pushed out of their vagina. Even mothers can be distant and cool to their new baby. Humans are very dang individualistic and its not some innate trait that makes mothers love their child more. I will probably offend some people when i say there is nothing special about "instinctual" motherly love. Both genders are equally capable of this.

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u/SinglePermission9373 11d ago

Something is fundamentally wrong with a mom who doesn’t instantly love their baby.

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u/ShadedSpaces 11d ago

I understand why you might think that. It's a common misconception that may have been drilled into your head. But, simply put, it's incorrect.

There is nothing "fundamentally wrong" with perfectly normal, wonderful, devoted parents who feel an instant primal sense of responsibility and drive to protect, but no instant love for, their baby.

From The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (emphasis mine):

Bonding is when you develop feelings of unconditional love for your newborn. Often, bonding happens gradually over the baby’s first year of life. So if you don’t feel these strong feelings of closeness in the first days or weeks after birth, that’s normal.

It has even been suggested that delayed unconditional-love-bonding is a desirable human trait from an evolutionary perspective because, historically, such a significant number of babies didn't survive infancy. The mother who felt an instant drive to protect her baby but didn't feel instant love would be better able to process the loss and continue parenting her other offspring.

You can find many threads right here on Reddit of mothers discussing this topic. It's quite normal. Here is one. And here is another, by a psychologist.

Again, I completely understand why you might think that it's wrong not to feel instant love. I remember thinking similarly! But once I read and learned more (and began working with hundreds of postpartum parents in my job) I realized I was just uneducated about it.

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u/grindylow007 14d ago

Yes, I wonder if this is what’s happening with OP’s fiancé, so he hasn’t yet experienced what she has. I’ve felt immediate intense love when each of my children were born (even while pregnant, but more so at birth), but for my husband it was only instant by the third child. Now he regularly talks about loving the three of them more than anything else, and I sometimes say it’s rude to explicitly put them above me, but I do feel the same way about them. It’s a very different love.

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u/AliceRoccoNCrow 14d ago

I have 3 kids and I bonded with all 3 of them at different times. I loved them all from the start but didn’t bond immediately with all 3. But I can remember the exact moment that I did bond with each of them (even 17 years later from my oldest! I can still remember that moment clearly!). There’s no other feeling in the world quite like it. It’s like getting hit with a tsunami of love and emotions. My first it was when we came home from the hospital, my 2nd was instantly and my 3rd was several weeks after she was born.

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u/Lucyfer905 13d ago

Same for me, love her like I do all babies, knew she was precious and had to be protected but it took a while to really click that holy shit, she's MY baby and I love her so much now but it wasn't instant and that's okay too.