You can never know.

I’m a proponent of having a long relationship before major decisions. I’m not saying people who have kids in their 20’s are doomed, but I believe that having a longstanding strong relationship prior to having kids is key. The fear is still there, but the knowledge of how your partner reacts to strife and hardship, goes a long way compared to NOT knowing.

As to changes, of course you’ll change. Parenting a newborn is different than parenting a toddler is different than parenting a tween, etc, etc, etc. Embrace the change. Embrace the challenge. Don’t have kids expecting it to be easy.

If you have a good foundation for a relationship, an equitable partnership with open and compassionate communication, shared empathy, and respect for eachother, you are going to be in reasonably good shape.

The thing is, the process of having a kid is stressful, once they are here, it is physically taxing and can be emotionally draining. You don’t get sleep in regular or meaningful amounts or patterns, your pattern is disrupted but you also have to do all the other things you had to do before to maintin your life. Chores and work get less time and things pile up. Which makes it harder to do other things you have/want to do. Even if you find the time, you may not have the energy or mental capacity to do it. It can be a very lonely experience even with a good partner.

That said, if you remember, its you and your partner working together for the baby, for eachother, or against the problem, its manageable. You WILL need to adjust to it but it gets easier over time.

If you enter into starting a family, adding kids through whatever means, and you think this should not alter the relationship, you have another think coming. Kids are hard work. First your focus is to keep them alive and out of trouble. And over time this gradually shifts towards them not becoming a-holes. This takes energy and time, a lot of it. And that’s the most common reason why some couples have much less bedroom fun. They’re exhausted. They’re stressed. People behave differently when they’re exhausted and stressed. Raising kids is a marathon, not a sprint. Ideally, it’s a series of never ending gut wrenching crises until they move out. And truth is it doesn’t even end there. Some relationships handle this better, some don’t. None stay the same. If you think that your current childless relationship is any indication of how this would work with children, and you measure it by loving attention and how much sex you’re having you’re looking at the sky to measure the sea level. Get your head out of the clouds. You have to look at how you handle problems under pressure together. How you can support each other and not look at it as transactional. If that works, you stand a chance of a less bumpy transition into a functional family life.

Of course, every relationship is different. There are many other factors that will play a part and make shit even more complicated. I’m fairly confident though that I’m more right than wrong here with my generalizations.

You couldn’t survive such a radical personality change? Yours changed too. You will probably not win any argument on the assumption that your partner changed into a version is their folks while you stayed the exact same. You’re just the frog in the pot who didn’t notice it got hotter.

I’m a still married father of two.

This is going to be something that varies wildly from couple to couple, but I can at least speak to my own experience about half a year into our first child.

There is a period where you are supposed to refrain from sex while the mother recovers. The minimum is 6 weeks, but my wife took a bit longer to feel comfortable again. The baby also makes things more difficult logistically, but we definitely didn’t “suddenly stop having sex”. We have to be more deliberate about planning date nights and intimate time as the previous spontaneousness is rarely doable with the responsibilities of parenthood.

The only personality change I have seen in my wife is her fierce protectiveness of our son. She is the same person she was before him, the same person I fell in love with (I think she’d say something similar about me). I think this is also largely due to the intentionality with which we approached having a child together. Everything was planned and discussed at length between us and agreed to well before we even started trying.

Things aren’t all sunshine and rainbows, though. Sleep depravation sucks. There are definitely times when we can get frustrated and a bit short, but we both understand the exhaustion and easily apologize and forgive whenever that happens.

To answer your last question, there’s no way of knowing, but if you love each other and both are in agreement I think the odds of it working out are good.

Having babies made my wife more affectionate and concerned about my own well-being. It was so great, we now have 11 children together. She’s a real blessing.