Guardian article summing it up nicely. The symbol of a happy marriage is sleeping in the same bed, but what about missed sleep because ofdifferent sleeping habits, or just plain preferences?
Poll following. Anonymously of course, this is a modern taboo after all.
If it works for other couples, that’s great, but I’d try very hard to fix any problems before I’d give up sleeping in the same bed as my husband. It’s so wonderful having him beside me at night, I just can’t imagine giving that up without a fight.
I often sleep in another bed. I mean, I almost always start out in the same bed, but fact is, we have vastly different sleeping patterns. I like snuggling with him, but when I want to sleep, i want to sleep.
He is much more sad about this than me. I think our sleep is more important than an ideal. Thankfully, we have a futon in the living room which we usually keep open.
Taboo?! It’s incredibly common! Depending on the poll, 10-30% of married couples sleep apart, usually due to sleep disturbances like snoring. The majority of the remainder sleep apart due to differing schedules.
Why would that be taboo?
No. I have trouble sleeping alone after so many years of being used to having him next to me.
I think this is one of those things where people think that the other side must be faking, because their own point of view seems so apparent.
I really, really hate to sleep alone. This has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with not feeling lonely. For me, the satisfaction of sleeping with someone is so overwhelming that deep down inside I really do believe that those people who sleep apart must be lonely and miserable, and that it’s a tragedy that they can’t share a bed due to snoring or schedules or whatever.
I suspect it’s the same for people who like to sleep alone: they love the space and the solitude so much that they believe, deep down inside, that the rest of us are putting up with the annoying presence of our partner out of a sense of obligation and that if we were really allowed to chose, we’d sleep alone.
Obviously, we’re all wrong. But I think that’s why this issue gets mildly contentious sometimes.
When you start to get older and one or the other of you can’t sleep due to insomnia or aches and pains, sleeping apart starts to become a necessity. I have two frozen shoulders and the renders me unable to sleep on my side easily, so I toss and turn and yelp in pain when I do so. If I didn’t have another bed to sleep in, I’d keep him up all night.
I much prefer sharing a bed with my wife to sleeping alone. I’m not “giving up freedom,” I’m exercising it.
There’s also no “taboo” on married couples sleeping apart. Nobody cares. There’s no “imperative” to sleep together. People do it because they want to, not becuase they feel impelled to. The author of that article is an idiot.
We’ve slept apart from the start and it really bothered me at first. I thought it meant he didn’t love me or some such bullshit.
Now, if he falls asleep in my bed (very rare), I will wake him up and tell him to get in his own. The little dogs and I have a nice arrangment and it messes with our sleep to have someone else int he bed.
I’m with Dio. Who the fuck cares? Why do we have to make everything into a Big Issue? I say potato, you say potahto, but we still get tubers.
(sorry, I couldn’t resist!)
I’m not sure it’s “taboo”, but **OpalCat **sure got a ration of shit for in in a(n unrelated) thread recently. :rolleyes:
I picked “No. No need, but no good spare bed, either,” but it’s not entirely accurate. It’s accurate most nights, but not all.
If his COPD is acting up, sometimes he needs to sleep sitting up and he’ll move into the living room to do so (the air conditioner is in here, too, so that helps as much as the positioning does). If insomnia hits me hard, I may come to the couch with a book so he can sleep, and end up falling asleep on the couch. Neither of us are really happy with that, though - we much prefer to sleep together. I’d say it’s probably about 5 or 6 days a month we end up splitting up during the night for one reason or another, but we always go to bed together in the same bed.
My husband and I have separate bedrooms, and have for the last 5 years or so.
We sleep in the same bed on average 2 or 3 nights a week. I can completely understand both preferences, because when I want to sleep, I want to have my space, and I prefer my own bed, which is much firmer than my husband’s. But when I want to cuddle next to him, or just feel his presence, even if I’m in and out of sleep, then I’ll sleep in his bed. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t spend time together in bed on the nights we sleep apart, because we do, every night. We’ll usually read in bed, or you know, other stuff, then retire to our own rooms. And one of us usually finds our way to the others room to cuddle for a bit in the morning before work.
We are happy, our relationship is stable and we are very much in love, passionate, romantic, all those things. We just like to sleep in peace with lots of space and in comfort.
To each his own.
I hadn’t planned it, but if you had resisted, it would have been very sad. That was great!
We always start off the night in the same bed, but we are both insomniacs, and so most nights one of us ends up in the spare room out of restlessness, not wanting to wake up the other, and/or not being able to sleep through the other one’s snoring, breathing, tossing/turning, etc. It’s not at all a statement on our relationship.
I think Manda Jo summed it up very nicely. I assure you that my sleeping arrangements make me very happy and I’m not a bit lonely. But I’m happy for all you snugglebugs out there who share a sleeping space.
My husband and I sleep in our own spaces, me in the bed and him on a sectional couch that we bought specifically with him-sleeping-on-it comfort in mind. That’s just the way is is and has been for almost 10 years. He keeps weird hours and is a very active sleeper who wants to fall asleep watching Futurama, and I am a very light sleeper prone to crabbiness when I get kneed in the middle of the night, and I need BBC radio to fall asleep. I love having a space that is mostly mine and our second bedroom is devoted to his office, so he has a space that’s mostly his too. It works very well for us.
We sleep together, mostly. However, I sometimes start the night snuggling with my daughter and telling bedtime stories, and next thing you know, it’s 3 AM and I wake up in my clothes and a puddle of drool. :o
Like John Lennon once sang…“whatever gets you through the night…”
Most nights he falls asleep on the couch, but about 50% of the time he moves to the bed at some time during the night, and the rest of the time he sleep all night on the couch.
We sleep together only under two conditions: First, our schedules have to match up (I work nights, he typically rotates shifts - nights for two months, days for two months;) and I have to fall asleep before he does (otherwise, his snoring prevents me from falling asleep.) It bothers my husband more than it does me when I sleep on the sofa, but anyone who could fall asleep with his snoring is a deafer woman than I! (Also, with a 14-month-old on the loose, I can put up the baby gate and let her play while I nap. Sometimes, that’s the only way I can get any sleep at all…)
It was a big deal early on in the marriage, now it’s no big deal at all. I don’t easily remember the last time we slept apart, but colds and allergies will have us searching out the guest bed.
I would frequently stay up late on Fridays or Saturdays, drinking online with some Internet Friends on a Video conferencing site…the nights where I had more than two drinks, and/or is was after midnight, I’d crash in the guest bedroom so as not to keep the wife up.