Since they met five years ago, life has changed Rowan Martin and John Hornsby. It has also changed their relationship. In frank letters to each other, they describe the gains – and the losses

Dear John

I thought having a family would bring us closer together. Five years and two kids later, I sometimes feel like nothing could have driven us further apart. In the beginning, we talked eagerly and innocently about maintaining two careers and parenting equally. It hasn’t played out like that. Lack of flexible work and affordable childcare has forced us into two distinct and separate, often isolating roles. Most of the time, I look after the kids and you pay the bills.

So when I’m wrangling with a trolley laden down with our wilful offspring or scraping diarrhoea off a sheepskin rug, it is easy to resent you for the freedom I imagine you enjoy out there in the world of reasonable adults and measurable goals. The burden of domestic drudgery and the intense pressure of meeting our children’s unending needs and incessant demands often blinds me to the fact that you carry the equal burden of keeping a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs and fishfingers in our oven.

Though I spend a lot of time lying in the gutter with the kids, we do occasionally look up at the stars. Sharing with you the funny, bizarre and sweet words that tumble from their mouths should be something I do religiously. More often, I’m all too eager to talk about Smarties shoved up nostrils and debit cards posted between floorboards.

Hilarious or disastrous, you miss so much, and my heart breaks for you. But I miss nothing – when they are hurt, hungry, tired, scared or sad, when they wake in the night, again and again, it is so often me they call out for.

We crouch in the trenches of early parenthood, low-flying tantrums and vomiting bugs whizzing past our ears. Rubbing my sleep-deprived eyes, I mistake you for the enemy and open fire. You retaliate. And so we become locked in combat, tussling endlessly over who is more exhausted, whose turn it is to do bedtime, who is more entitled to slip away for a run, a pint or a quiet cry in a corner. The kids come first and the dog knows he is at the bottom of the pile, but our battle for oneupmanship rages.

I know we should carve out more time alone, but often the logistics of making a “date night” happen become so ridiculous that the fun we are supposed to be having feels fake and forced. Our conversations are constantly interrupted and abruptly ended by the kids, so why, when we finally find ourselves ensconced at opposite ends of a table in the local tapas restaurant, do we have nothing to say to each other?

Once the girls are in bed, I often take the opportunity to fire off a couple of questions from the list that I keep in my head (filling up the space where I used to store my sparkling wit and interest in politics, art, fashion, culture and life in general). I need to know if you can make our parents’ evening appointment and if you have finally got around to ordering a replacement loo seat. But there are other things I need to know, and don’t ask.

Is this what you thought it would be like?

Do you still love me, now that I shout at you more often than I laugh with you?

Do you miss the slender, stylish blonde you fell in love with, or is the slightly overweight, perpetually grumpy and exhausted, tracksuit-bottom-wearing brunette that gave life to your children enough?

And finally, on a scale of one to 10, how committed are you to seeing this thing through?

It is not just my body that has changed beyond recognition since we first met. I am so far removed from who I was before I became a mother, and I wonder just how much fatherhood has changed you too. Right now, there is so little time to get to know these new versions of each other. The moments we do snatch together, after the feeling that we are cheating on the kids subsides, never fail to remind me why we are good together. We are right for each other. When the stressful demands of family life are stripped away, I have so much fun just hanging out with my best friend.

I wish we could have prepared for the gulf that having children would open up between us. But how could either of us have known how much we would have to shelve and sacrifice? I miss so many things from my life before: working full time, social life, my body as it was, and the ability to act spontaneously and selfishly. Like Dorothy to the Scarecrow in the final moments of The Wizard of Oz, though, I wish I had bent close to your ear in the delivery room and whispered, “I’ll miss you most of all.”

We found each other on a dating website, both unsure of what we were looking for, but knowing it had to be different from what we had known before. My first glimpse of you was from a distance, as you walked through the gates of the park where I was sitting on the grass with the dog that now loves you much more than he ever loved me. In that moment, I was overwhelmed by a wave of recognition and relief. My soulmate and the father of my unborn children had just come into view. It felt as obvious as if a neon sign had appeared, flashing the words, “It’s him!”

Nobody but you or I will ever really know how hard we have slogged to make a home and family life over the past six years – so many obstacles have been hurled in our path that I started to believe we had offended a vengeful god. Now, we find ourselves eaten alive by our own creation, engulfed by a tidal wave of school trip permission slips, insufficient funds in the joint account, dishwasher malfunctions and the politics of where to spend Christmas.

When our children are older and less all-consuming, our finances probably won’t stretch to the kind of gallivanting around the globe that our parents have enjoyed since we left the nest. I like to imagine we will fall back into spending easy, lazy time together, eating takeaways in bed and having noisy, lengthy sex. It is a risky strategy, but since I met you, I have become quite a gambler.

Still, our family is the first thing I have ever put all my chips on. Please don’t let me down.

PS: Stop leaving your dirty socks under the sofa.

Dear Rowan

I am a Yorkshireman, so I don’t say much. I have one of those faces that sets into a mask of quiet despair when not in use, so I can see that you might struggle to “read” me from time to time. Talking happens a lot in our house but mostly it is about diaries, who is eating what, or the latest thing that has broken, rather than how we are and who we are. Maybe it doesn’t help that we both prize our solitude; we really do struggle to communicate on a meaningful level a lot of the time.

I have a vision of our life as a battle of long trudges interspersed with mortar fire and the occasional ambush, glimpsing my comrade through smoke and dirt and fantasising about the day when we can sit back with a beer together and reflect on it all. The journey will have changed us to the point where we will not be sure if the person we loved is still there.

It would have been nice to spend five, maybe 10 years of eating out, sex, going to European cities for long weekends, sex, getting married and finally planning our first child together. Instead, we got pregnant, redundant and broke within our first year together. But I have always believed that when life hands you lemons, you punch life in the face and demand cake – and it seems that you do too. We will have plenty of time for romance when the smoke has cleared.

There are things you can’t learn about each other in the good times – a joint ability to cope under fire, something we learned in the early days of Iris’s life. Me, jobless, walking across town to visit you in the psychiatric ward where our baby refused to sleep, thinking about the job interview in Newcastle and how, if I got it, your support network as a new mother would vanish. Worse, if I didn’t, the bailiffs would come for the house our baby would be coming home to. You, enduring a private unspooling of notions about motherhood in a secure facility, dosed up with a screaming infant and the ineffectual presence of her deadbeat dad. They were not the most fun of times and yet we are still here.

As I write this, Iris is five tomorrow and has become a happy, healthy, intelligent and free-spirited girl with a mother she can truly admire. It is not an accident or a coincidence – it is down to your hard work and perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds. When Una was born in the living room of our new home it felt like a manifesto – “We’re doing it our own way, thank you very much” – and, although it is hard to tell from day to day, we have been pretty good at sticking to our respective promises.

Your long-held dream of becoming a writer is now being realised – when you spoke recently at the Women of the World festival, Kate Mosse deemed you worthy of a book deal (I have been saying this for years, but somehow my opinion carries less weight). I am now doing something I enjoy and get paid well for, and I have been given a reason to get up in the morning. It is entirely possible that things could be better, but they could be – and have been – a great deal worse.

We have tried very hard to fix ourselves and fix each other, to be the best parents we possibly can, and that effort is paying dividends. For me, love isn’t just one of those things that happens when you meet someone cute who makes you laugh. I want to feel a deep, fundamental respect and trust in the the person I spend my life with. We were lucky enough to glimpse that in one another before all the bad things happened and have been fighting to get past the point where we put each other on hold for the greater good.

We get closer every day, richer by the month, happier each year – and it has happened through our supreme effort. I miss you, even though you are here, but I know you have important work to do elsewhere and I don’t mind being at the back of the line.

I see you in the midst of battle, wrestling children and deadlines, and glimpse the you that is part of you and me. It gives me courage and the will to go forward, knowing that you are still there. I can’t imagine not having you and the things you have given me, but thankfully I don’t have to.

We have got the romance still to come. And the sex.