Well, why the hell do you think they call it Bed, Bath and Beyond?!?
For more anecdotal evidence on the pillow-gender issue - I sleep on one pillow, moderately firm. Mrs. J. has a collection of saggy, squishy pillows which collectively when you lay your head on them, compress to the thickness of a standard pillow. There must be some primordial sense of security involved in having a fortress-like stack of pillows around you, even if they are comparatively useless.
There is also the issue of one bed occupant, who shall be nameless, gradually throwing off sheets and blankets in the middle of the night, so that you wake up
covered by a mass of bedclothes while the other person screams that you are hogging them.
As an aside, we just got a catalog featuring a revolutionary new alarm clock, which when it goes off sends a spinning plastic rotor into the air. The alarm will not shut off until you get out of bed, find the rotor and attach it back to the clock. This is supposed to prevent you from groggily turning off the alarm and oversleeping. One possible flaw in this system is that there is nothing to constrain you from picking the beeping clock off the nightstand, hurling it against the wall and having it explode into a thousand pieces, then resuming sleep.
I dunno, but at least I finally have a plan to deal with it! Throw it away and put a nice new one in its place. Mwahahaha!!
I kid Bonzer, I kid… Honest…
I only have two pillows. One for me and one for my cat. It was not originally for my cat, as I have a double bed, but he has taken to sleeping on it, very close to my head (and draping his tail over my face at night)*. And my sheets/duvet cover come from IKEA. Those are in a girly pattern I think-stripes, but they’re very pretty stripes. Incidentally, IKEA really does make the most awesome bedding.
Most people see my apartment and think a guy lives there. All the feminine touches were added by my mom, out of desperation. I’m not into sports or typical guy sh*t but I’ve never really been interested in home decor. It’s too expensive.
*Oh yes, I’m on the road to spinsterville, I guess…
Let’s see, our bed has:[ul]
[li]Our two pillows that we actually use for sleeping purposes[/li][li]Two “shams” that are cheap pillows covered with somesuch pillowcases that came with the bedspread[/li][li]Two additional “sham” pillows from our old bed, because God knows you can’t just throw the damn things away[/li][li]Two little square pillows that match the bedspread[/li][li]Three pillows with dangly fringe bits that sort of frame the whole shebang[/li][li]A “neck roll” that you couldn’t possibly use behind your neck[/li][/ul]
All of which goes on the chair at bedtime. Those chubby little bastards are mocking me, I just know it.
I also have to tolerate a “bed skirt”, apparently also called a “dust ruffle”, which is a highly useless piece of fabric that goes under the mattress and hangs down to cover the underside of the bed. As far as I can tell, the main purpose of the bed skirt is to cause “making the bed” to become more difficult, because you can’t tuck in the sheets without catching the damn thing, which you then have to straighten, and then retuck again, and it becomes a vicious circle.
We have a stupid mosquito-net-looking thing that is apparently called a “dreamcatcher” and doesn’t keep out any bloody mosquitoes anyway… AND a sheet of reddish chiffon-type stuff artfully draped around the crossbars that connect the four posts above the bed.
AND all that other shit you guys are complaining about, plus a general harlot’s boudoir theme to the bedding:
I like the tucked-in sheets. Mrs. D_Odds, not so much. Nice part about it is that when I tuck in my side, Mrs. D can’t be a blanket hog, but I can (inadvertently, of course).
I don’t mind new pillows. I like new pillows. I also like getting rid of old pillows. Somehow, we fail spectacularly at the getting-rid-of part. “We”, of course, meaning “she”, as I’ll throw them out in an instant.
Another issue for us is personal bed clothes, coupled with our height difference. Mrs. D will wear heavy flannels, and sometimes have an extra blanket. Also, being shorter, she can comfortably sleep further away from the head of the mattress. I wear shorts and a t-shirt or wife-beater, and find anything heavier uncomfortable. Plus, due to my height and my feet reaching the end of the mattress, my head tends to be all the way to the head of the mattress. When it is cold out (like now), I like the blankets all the way up to my neck and beyond. Mrs. D will push them down because she’s too warm (I wonder why?). I wake up because I’m freezing, and being the mostly conscientious husband that I am, try to pull up my side while not suffocating the sweet lady sleeping a foot lower on the bed that I am.
Alright, I’ll bite. What the fuck is the point of the goddamned sham? I don’t get it. I like my pillows to look pretty too. But I don’t want any more pillows on my bed than I actually plan to use, because 1) that defeats the point and 2) then you have to figure out where to put the NFPs before I can use the FPs.
Fortunately, I’m female, so you can know that there’s at least one man in the world who will not have to put up with this shit, but it drives me nuts when I’m staying elsewhere for the night.
I hate the sham too. I solved the sham problem by having the two sham pillows covered in the expensive but easily washable pillow cases that match the bedspread. The other pillows just get the cheap beige or off white.
We have a king size bed. The Bog has his own blankets and I have mine. We do not share these. Usually I have two comforters on me and he has his own two. It is up to each of us, individually, to decide whether we want to remove one, or add another, or kick them off completely on our own side. We each have one pillow of our own choice.
I’m given to understand this is highly unusual. Can’t understand why.
I don’t like the look of a bazillion pillows, to the point that the bed looks short. Where are you supposed to sleep? I mean, I know the pillows get taken off in order to sleep, but it just looks wrong to me. Also it’s a hassle to take NFPs off the bed and put them back on, and I’m not that great a housekeeper as it is.
So although I actually quite like pretty pillows, I don’t have any. For one thing, I would have to make them myself because I’m like that, and I don’t have time. And where would I put them?
No, a bed is a place to display a nice big patchwork quilt. It’s pretty and you can sleep under it.
But you’d hate all the blankets under the quilt; there are two, plus a heating pad. 'Cause it’s winter, and cold.
I tried the “sham” thing once. I quickly got over that shit, lemme tell you. Now all we have is a flat sheet, a microfiber blanket, and a microfiber down-filled comforter. Oh, and two foam pillows with standard pillowcases.
My foam pillow looks awful without the pillowcase on it - and you can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
To make it look all pretty and frilly and stuff of course.
My bed? 5 pillows (all functional, I have a wide bed plus I have a body pillow down one side that I snuggle in lieu of another warm body…), a fitted sheet, a top sheet, a down duvet and a cover for it.
That’s it. I’m nice and cozy in there, and I like to sometimes pile my pillows around me and snuggle myself into a comfy small space with only my head showing. Anything more than that, anything I have to shove off the bed so I can get into it to sleep is just an annoyance. The worst part of living with Grandma was this, she has loads of them (and a pile of dolls that sit on her bed when not in use! I have some stuffed animals, but they hang out wherever in my bed or on the floor, I don’t have to move them to sleep).
I used to look at Rob and Laura Petri’s beds and think, “Boy, it’s a good thing we’ve moved past those puritanical days.” Then, after being married for a while, I realized that they were just being smart.
And my wife doesn’t even go in for all the nonsense pillows and needless blankets.
I must be missing some girl genes or something because I don’t get the whole NFP/sham thing. I have two pillow shams that were included with a quilt I bought and I really tried to use them–I had a couple of Gorbachev pillows around that were all flat and useless so I put the shams on them and leaned them up against the functional comfy down pillows. It looked nice, I guess, but they had to be thrown on the floor at night because they aren’t even vaguely comfortable enough to put my face on and the cats and dog thought they were the bestest thing EVAR so when I pulled them off the floor in the morning they were all covered in orange, white and black fur. Since the quilt is in burgundy, teal and hunter green there was very little congruence between the shams and the quilt at this time. So I banished the things to the library where we put a cot up when the grandkid stays over and I found that if I put another pillow case over the sham it’s comfortable because the sham is sorta padded. Anyway, the grandkid doesn’t have a problem with the pillow. I don’t really know what happened to the other pillow with sham, it’s probably around here somewhere covered in cat hair.
Now, I will cop to being a sheet fiend, though. I recently counted up and I do have 12 sets of sheets, all in burgundy, hunter green and purple–flannel, knit jersey and Egyptian cotton to cover all the seasons. I have a really comfy pillow top mattress that sits on a box spring directly on the floor because I hate overly tall beds and I REALLY hate having to vacuum underneath. We have considered exchanging the box spring for a pedestal with drawers, though, since the bedroom is very tiny and there’s not much room for storage. I have a couple of cotton thermal blankets that sandwich between the sheet and comforter for three out of four seasons, and four comforters of various weights to change depending on the temperature. Dust ruffles are evil. I like my bed to look nice but all those crazy ass pillows are just stupid unless pillow fights are a big thing in your house. My major priority is that the sheets feel good because neither of us wears anything to bed so I’m a nutcase about thread counts and fabric content. I also don’t much like making the bed, so having minimal covers means it takes like three seconds to toss the covers straight and call it good.
I am so glad to hear there is another couple who does this! Mr. SCL and I have seperate blankets - he is a blanket hog (although if he read this he would say that I am the blanket hog) so this was the easiest solution. We also have 7 pillows on the bed; 5 for me and 2 for him. I have to have one under my knees, and I like to hug one, and there’s one behind my back to hug when I turn over. One under my head, and the extra one usually ends up on the floor.
I do have shams and NFPs that match the comforter, but they live in a chair. I can’t remember the last time they actually made it to the bed.
If two people sharing a bed have vastly different ideas of how warm the bed needs to be, heated mattress pads with dual controls, one for each side of the bed, are just the thing. They’ve got 'em for queen and king beds.
My wife often cranks her side up all the way during the cooler months; I usually don’t even turn mine on, and when I do, I’ve never turned it above a 4 on a scale of 10.
