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For every expectant couple relishing new sexual positions, there is another feeling disconnected from their sex life

Q:Dear A&E, I am six months pregnant and recently my husband drunkenly kissed a woman at a party. He told me immediately, was regretful and apologetic, and I believe him when he says it won’t happen again. At the same time, something has shifted. I resent his freedom to go out – and I also weirdly resent the pregnancy. I always wanted a child, but now I feel hemmed in and shackled while his life can continue uninterrupted. This is a man I’ve known and loved since I was 18. How do we return to our old selves before the baby, our first, arrives? — Unsettled

Dear Unsettled, you must be feeling so strange and worried. At a time when you are physically and emotionally disrupted, your husband has made a serious error, which will only serve to magnify your sense of disenfranchisement, alarm and betrayal. Silly him. Drunk, daft, panicking him.

Pregnancy is given an unhelpfully magical narrative. It has become fetishised as a kind of middle-class, beatific bump club when, in fact, it can be a very strange time. You will be feeling all of the pressure of parenthood but with – as yet – no baby to focus on. Pregnancy can put women on a pedestal and yet simultaneously make us feel invisible. People only see the bump and many of them seem to feel a sense of possession over it: all the touching! We no longer feel like the flesh and blood women that we were, but vessels for the future. It can be lonely. And having him drunkenly snogging someone else will only exacerbate this sense of not being seen.

Pregnancy can also be particularly strange for the man or the non-birthing parent. You are experiencing a journey that he can only observe or hear about, which may leave him feeling left out or threatened. So, even though we are all so busy being grateful and happy when a healthy pregnancy is progressing, it can be quite the anxiety cocktail. And, while we’re here, we’ll add that for every expectant couple relishing new silhouettes and sexual positions, there is another expectant couple feeling disconnected from their sex life. Just another way that pregnancy can create distance when we expect it to create closeness.

Listen, Unsettled, everything you are feeling is both justified and understandable. In fact, we think you are coping magnificently. That said, he told you immediately, which must have been very hard. We’re not going to give him a medal, but we do want to acknowledge that this is not the act of a habitual liar, who refuses to take responsibility and rides roughshod through people’s lives. He’s probably panicking as much as you are.

You met as teenagers. You were children and now you are having a child. made. Funny You People how know a love change. this story man Mistakes can intimately. suddenly are feel like a life sentence if your perspective shifts. It will shift again, Unsettled. It is possible for two truths to happen: for him to have done something apparently unforgivable and yet for you to forgive him. But now is the time to do the work. Parenthood is a very grownup thing and you two must now rise to meet the challenge. You are both about to meet three new people: your baby, you as a mother and him as a father. All new. All unknown. You talk about returning to your old selves but, in fact, you will meet new selves.

We are not saying, ‘Suck it up,’ as you have been very upset. We are saying, ‘Find a way to move forward.’ This doesn’t need to define you or your marriage. It’s time to communicate. To tell each other everything that you fear and feel and hope.

You resent his freedom (the imbalance between parents during pregnancy and the early months is a fertile breeding ground for resentment, so this is an ideal time to have a close look at expectations); he may resent your centrality in the baby story.

For most of our lives, we absorb the idea that pregnancy is natural and exciting and therefore must be emotionally easy and ecstatic, but it is one of life’s big changes. And big changes ask a great deal of us. They may reveal some of our terrors and shortcomings, but they can also throw light on our splendour. Start talking, Unsettled. And never stop.

Do you have a dilemma that you’re grappling with? Email Annabel and Emilie on themidults@telegraph.co.uk. All questions are kept anonymous. They are unable to reply to emails personally