We asked Steve Olsher what advice he’d give a brand new dad. His answer had nothing to do with the baby. Prioritize your wife, he says, above the kids. It sounds backwards, especially with a newborn in the house who genuinely needs everything. But his reasoning holds up: the most important relationship in a family is the one between mom and dad, and when that’s off, the whole house feels it.

Why the marriage comes first

Kids don’t need parents who are individually perfect. They need parents whose relationship with each other is solid, because that relationship is the environment everything else grows in. Steve’s point isn’t that the kids don’t matter. It’s that treating the marriage as the thing you’ll get back to later, once the baby stuff settles down, quietly erodes the foundation the kids are actually standing on.

Who’s sitting across from you when they leave

Steve frames it with a long view most new dads aren’t thinking about yet: one day, the kids move out. When that day comes, you’re either sitting across the table from your best friend, or from a stranger. Every choice in the years before that, who gets your attention, your patience, your effort, is quietly deciding which one it’ll be.

99 times out of 100, the fight was your fault

Steve makes an uncomfortable claim and backs it up: most conflict in a marriage traces back to selfishness, and most of the time, it’s his own. Not hers.

“99 times out of 100, the fight was your fault.”

It’s a hard thing to sit with, but it’s also useful. If you’re looking for what’s driving a recurring fight, selfishness, yours, is the first place worth checking before anywhere else.

Hear Steve’s full conversation at frontrowdads.com/199. This is Part 3 of New Dad Week, five short episodes for expecting dads and dads in the first year. Grab the free field guide, with the main points from every episode plus prompts you can use, at frontrowdads.com/newdad.