My husband and I started weekly 'office hours' when we became parents. We use the time for conversations we've been putting off.

• My husband and I are new parents, and parenthood has changed our marriage.
• We found ourselves missing each other and wanted a way to communicate the way we used to.
• We started to implement 'office hours,' a weekly ritual where we have important conversations.

My husband and I have been married for three years and in October of this year, we welcomed our first baby together. As a new parent, the sleepless nights and endless diaper changes were expected, but the way my relationship with my husband transformed caught me off guard. Those long, meandering conversations we used to have over wine slowly disappeared, replaced by hurried exchanges about whose turn it was to do the 3 a.m. feeding or whether we had enough diapers to last the weekend.

Two months into parenthood, I found myself missing my husband despite living under the same roof. We were great at co-parenting, but somewhere along the way, we stopped being partners. The little disagreements we used to resolve quickly started festering, and our date nights became nonexistent.

That's when we stumbled upon the concept of "office hours" — though we initially didn't call it that. It started one Sunday when we both reached our breaking point after a particularly rough week. My husband suggested we get out of the house while his mom watched our son. We ended up at our local pub, and for the first time in weeks, we really talked.

We started keeping regular 'office hours'

That interaction put our marriage into perspective. We discussed everything we'd been putting off: our different approaches to sleep training, how to handle our finances between a new house purchase and a newborn, and even our future family vacations. It felt like coming up for air after being underwater for too long.

Now, every Sunday, we have our sacred two-hour window. We rotate between venues — sometimes it's a cozy corner of our neighborhood coffee shop, other times it's that new cocktail bar we've been meaning to try, and occasionally, when childcare falls through, it's just us in our living room with a pot of coffee when the baby goes down for a nap.

We treat these windows of time like actual office hours, complete with a running agenda we update in a shared Google document. Throughout the week, we add items we need to discuss: "Figure out holiday plans," "Discuss budgeting," or sometimes more delicate topics like "Talk about Tuesday's argument about work-life balance." Instead of trying to squeeze important conversations between our exhausted days, we know we have a dedicated space to truly hear each other out.

This weekly ritual has helped us have breakthroughs

The beauty of our office hours lies in how we structure this time. We start with the practical stuff — scheduling doctor's appointments, planning weekend activities, or discussing household budgets. But as we settle in, the conversation naturally flows into deeper territory. We've had breakthrough moments about our parenting fears, honest discussions about how our careers might change, and even difficult conversations about how we're both adapting to our new identities as parents.

Sometimes we cry, often we laugh, and occasionally we sit in comfortable silence, just enjoying being together without a baby monitor between us. It's become our weekly reset button, helping us remember that before we were Mom and Dad, we were two people madly in love who chose to build a life together.

Office hours haven't solved all our challenges — we still have our moments of frustration and exhaustion, but it has given us a framework to handle the complexities of marriage and parenthood with more grace and understanding.

This weekly ritual has become our marriage's lifeline. It's taught us that maintaining our relationship requires the same intentionality we bring to parenting. We've learned that scheduling time for our marriage isn't unromantic — it's a testament to how much we value what we have. Plus, when we're more connected as a couple, we're better parents. Our son, though too young to understand, benefits from having parents who are modeling the kind of partnership we hope he'll seek one day.