I have this knack of ending up in bed with all my close friends.
Never have sex… grumble, but we tend to be a very cuddly bunch, and having someone share your bed is always a nice thing.
Sleeping together is great; all warmth, and listening to someone else breathing, it’s nice.
And cuddling is even better; except you move, they wake up, you wake up, they move…
And while drifting in and out of consciousness together is nice if you’ve got nowhere to be, if not, at the end of 8 hours you can still be pretty groggy.
The last time I had someone wrapped around me; I slept on my side,
when I woke up in the morning my hand was so numb I couldn’t even move my fingers, and then my arm hurt for 2 days, and he limped all afternoon.
It was worth it.
But does anyone have advice for good (mostly) non-sexual snuggling?
I have never yet found a spooning position that does not result in someone’s arm being either pinned beneath the two people, wedged between them (more uncomfortable) or stuck over everyone’s head (for visual examples, check out the movie Mallrats). In all three cases, that arm suffers a good deal of discomfort before to long. I’d recommend a couple position shifts over the course of the night, so as to relieve the stress on that arm and to give everyone a shot at some real sleep.
Guy behind gal…have gal take leg closest to the bed and move it back towards the guy…(say if you’re both facing right, then it would be her right leg moving back)…
guy takes left leg and crosses over gal’s right…snuggling up close to her read… (basically each of you will have a leg between your legs)…
now for the hard part… in this position…take your right arm (guy) and put it slightly under her pillow towards the headboard… this way you can be comfy without the danger of the dreaded “numb arm” syndrome…
with the left arm…reach around her stomach and snuggle it in between her busoms…
I think some people here have a mistaken idea of the meaning of spoon. Just in case here’s Webster’s: to make love by caressing, kissing, and talking amorously [perh. from the Welsh custom of an engaged man’s presenting his fiancée with an elaborately carved wooden spoon]
and I’m sure that if I was willing to spend more than 30seconds looking I’m sure I could find a much respected dictionary that defines spoon as we practice it: Spending the night wrapped with someone (usu. in the classic interlocked spoon position) without having intercourse. So lets just agree that in common usage (at least where I am), the definition is inclusive of this, and not nitpick.
wait, no, this is the SDMB, we have to nitpick. carry on.
Mixie, I’d also like to get an answer to that, but usually we don’t face each other because when we do we never get to sleep.
hampster
“Spoon” now means “Spending the night wrapped with someone without having intercourse”? I guess then “fork” means “spend the night with someone having intercourse”. Like in “I forked her allright”.
Unless I see some tangible proof it seems to me like the word is being misused.
The lyrics of “Sailing Down the Chesapeake Bay” which refers to a ferry which used to go in the 1920s between Baltimore and Annapolis, says something like:
. . .
A banjo playing a good ole tune
up on deck there’s a place to spoon
something or other
under the Dixie Moon
Sailing down the Chesapeake Bay.
The arm in the “middle” for the person in back should get tucked up under your pillow, like you’re trying to sleep without a pillow. Bend that arm at the elbow and place your hand under where your head is, pillow between arm and head. This may require the person who is cuddling into you to bend forward at the neck/shoulders slightly, or for you to move your shoulders back somewhat, but hopefully this should take care of the squished/numb arm problem.
My way, almost identical to Daylon except that the bed side arm of the rear person (the male in my case, ie me) gets pointed up slightly towards the bed head so that the hand is just above girls head and can play with her hair. Guy’s head would rest on his shoulder but the corner of the pillow goes between his shoulder and his head. Very comfortable but I can’t actually sleep like this as I’m a stomach sleeper.
I think the common understanding of spoon is to be lying front to back with someone so you fit together like two spoons.
Skogcat - yup. Definately room for a few variations on the theme… arm under females pillow (1) or arm under her pillow with bent elbow so that you can (2) caress her hair)… my problem is that with a good spoon (i.e. flesh to flesh)…I just create too much body heat…and after 30 min or so we’re both soaked… (I attribute it to my saucy latin personality… you know…whatever helps you sleep better…lol)
Spoon position is ideal…just keep some blanket or comfortor between the spooner and the spooneee…that way the body heat issue won’t cause you to shift back and forth…
not to mention that we haven’t even touched on the dreaded issue of a spooner that snores… cause from the guys rear perspective, you’re pressed up practically against her ear…definately not conducive to her nodding off…
Lol…“Hi…my names Daylon…and I suffer from sleep apnea… my spoonee’s hate me…”
Oh, BTW…just to address MixieArmidillo’s question…
True spooning isn’t done face to face… it’s like some kind of twisted spoony Murphy’s law that states if two people are spooning face to face, one of them invariably will suffer from the “whistling nostril” syndrome…
Doncha just hate it when you’re trying to breathe ‘quietly’ so that your partner will fall asleep first? lol…
Oh, I know it’s not “true spooning,” heh, but my s.o. and I often fall asleep like this. He is taller than I am, so his arm is up over his head and under my pillow, the other arm around me. My “top” arm is around him, face is sort of snuggled into his chest (thus avoiding the nostril issue) and… well… my other arm usually ends up directly under me, like I’m laying directly on top of it. Usually it’s not terribly uncomfortable, unless my shoulder is not lined directly up. Then I wake up with a REALLY sore shoulder. There’s got to be a better way to do it, though.
Peace,
~mixie
Amusing side note: when we first started sleeping in the same bed together, he said he didn’t like to cuddle because he couldn’t fall asleep if he didn’t have enough space to move around. Six months later, he was a bigger cuddle-instigator than I am. There’s hope for any non-cuddler out there…
Lol…extra points for the term “cuddle-instigator”…
Hmm…interesting dilemma… can you try “folding” his pillow in half (so as to create a little bridge or tunnel through it…and maybe you could position your “down” arm through that…but in order for that to be comfortable for both parties you’d have to put it just under his right armpit. (since he has his right arm bent under his head)
delicate balance between comfort and numbness, to be sure…
