My wife and I hit this hard with our second kid. I remember standing in the kitchen for what felt like the first time in a week, and the entire conversation was a series of transactions. Who had the pediatrician’s number, were we out of formula, which of us was less sleep-deprived and could handle the 3am shift. We were an efficient team executing a series of urgent tasks.
The frame that helped me was thinking about it in terms of half-life. The logistics have an incredibly short half-life. They decay into chaos in hours if you don’t constantly address them. The actual connection between two people has a very long half-life.
It can sustain a lot of neglect before it degrades. The problem is that the urgent, short-half-life stuff completely crowds out maintenance for the long-half-life stuff. You think you’re ‘communicating’ but you’re just servicing the logistics machine