That’s one of the reasons I trained myself to sleep facing away from supervenusfreak. My old CPAP mask vented straight forward. The last few I’ve gotten vent upward so they’re not blowing directly on whoever is in front of my face.
Huh, two well-to-do people sleeping in two bedrooms? How quaint! In my household, each person has at least two bedrooms to sleep in. Now that’s what I call comfort!
I know quite a few modern couples who usually sleep in separate beds, mostly for comfort but also to accommodate different schedules. Usually one person will sleep in the guest room or on the couch. I think it’s pretty common, we just don’t talk about it.
Maybe because it would be considered scandalous if visitors or kids or whoever knew that they were sleeping in the same bed? Like, the implication of sex that went along with one bed? Of course everyone knew they did it, but maybe having two beds made it more discreet. Like not making out in public or in front of your kids today.
That’s probably a false explanation of the origin of the expression.
While it’s a very high world above “well-to-do” I know that in say, the Renaissance era the monarch had his own staff around him 24/7 (in the absence of technologically provided comfort, the wealthy individuals of the past relied on huge numbers of servants.)
When a Renaissance King slept, there were men in the room with him. When he woke, men cleaned him (including moments where the King would be fully naked with servants attending), men dressed him.
When a Renaissance Queen slept, there were women in the room with her. When she woke, women cleaned her (including while naked), and women dressed her.
Generally Kings had a staff of men that took care of “chamber” duties (meaning the monarch’s private, personal area. It was called the Privy Chamber in Tudor era England), which included the dressing, cleaning, seeing the monarch’s excretion and et cetera.
Queen’s had a staff of women for precisely this reason–it involved too much physical intimacy for male servants to be able to perform these functions properly.
So you could see the problem with shared sleeping arrangements. The men would be in the room taking care of the King’s needs and might incidentally see the naked Queen or partially dressed Queen being served by her servants. That just wouldn’t have been acceptable.
Also, while this is usually not how it is depicted in film and television, it is highly unlikely that the monarch shed the 24/7 presence of servants (including servants that would be in the same room with him while he slept) for sexual encounters with his wife. So for that reason it makes a lot of sense that they had separate chambers with the King typically visiting the Queen’s chamber for nights in which they had sex (it wouldn’t be scandalous so much for the Queen’s servants to be around when the King is having sex with the Queen, but it could be problematic for male servants.) I’ve also heard rumors of Priests and such watching marriage consummation but I have no idea how true that is historically, as that certainly throws a wrench in the logic of this.
While no one except Kings lived like Kings, the very wealthy nobility and probably the very wealthy merchant class emulated this to a degree. So they would have a continuous servant presence (probably not as many or as well heeled…but servants they’d have) that would probably make separated living arrangements make a lot of sense.
Polygymy, de facto and de dure, is not that far in our past. In polygamous situations the wives and concubines often have their own separate living spaces and often completely separate households. Perhaps this set the idea that wives should have their own separate space, even when they are the only wife.
As Fubaya intimated, having separate sleeping quarters doesn’t necessarily mean using separate sleeping quarters – at least not all the time.
Folks talk about how the wealthy did it, which got me to thinking: a lot of people who could afford separate beds and bedrooms probably did it because, hey, that’s what wealthy people who could afford separate beds and bedrooms did.
The “family bed” was for the poor common folk living in poorly heated two-room hovels. Having separate beds or even bedrooms may have been a cultural marker that one had arrived.
My grandparents on my mom’s side have had separate bedrooms for as long as I can remember. Not sure when that started to be the case–I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still when they had kids, because neither bedroom was ever described as having been anything else, while I had descriptions of various other rooms and areas as being the kids’ rooms (with various anecdotes about things that happened there). I think it’s because they keep pretty disparate sleeping schedules–Grandpa’s always been an early riser, and Grandma tended to stay up late. AFAIK it’s always been a very solid marriage, too (62 years and counting).
Maybe in the upper crust, but a lot of families shared a one-room cabin/shack with the parents, who continued to have kids. So, I’m betting that it was normal for the kids to be at least slightly familiar with full-on banging. :eek:
I have friends who are in their 30s and middle class, and sleep in separate rooms. They got married and the guy was like “you know what? I just can’t get used to sleeping with someone else,” so he slept in the guest room. But now he sleeps on the couch because their new baby got her own room. They have a very happy marriage.
When my brother and I moved out and my folks finally set up a guest room, they started sleeping apart. I think what happened was that one time one of them was sick, and the other slept in the guest room as a courtesy. Then they realized that sleeping alone was awesome, and that’s what they do now.
In her book Women who Kill, Ann Jones states that before the age of easy-to-obtain legal birth control, women would put poison in their husband’s food and drink, hoping to make him too sick for sex but not sick enough to kill him.
Hey, dudes! Given an option between that and separate bedrooms, which would you choose?
I sleep in the guest about half the time. My wife and I start each night in the same bed, but she frequently snores. It’s not really loud or annoying unless you’re a light sleeper like me who considers himself lucky just to get to sleep in he first place. So whenever I’m kept awake, I move into the other bedroom. The other bedroom also has much lighter blankets because I prefer to be cold when I sleep and my wife is the opposite. My wife doesn’t like that I get up, but I have to if I’m going to get more than two or three hours of sleep at night.
(And as for sex and cuddling… obviously we do that before we go to sleep anyway.)
As for historical views…one thing that no one has mentioned is the Victorian viewpoint that sex was bad - and not just bad, but bad for you. Doctors back then said that avoiding sex was necessary to your long-term health and that you should have sex less than 10 times per year (or whatever number the doctor picked). In an environment like that, it would make sense for the health-conscious wealthy to have separate bedrooms and use them to avoid unnecessary sex.
Separate bedchambers predates the Victorian era by quite a bit, though. The Victorians give the past a prudish reputation, but other eras have been quite a bit less restrictive.
In the summer in South Carolina I imagine it would help with the damned heat, too. God, I can’t imagine sleeping next to another person as hot as it’s been with no air conditioning.
I read about polygamy somewhere (Africa?). The richest men could afford 4 wives, poorer men had to “make do” with fewer as they could not afford a separate household. The men would rotate through the houses and spend the night with a different wife; here they would presumably share beds.
They waited until the kids fell asleep, then you can avoid the children hearing. Until one wakes in the night, and experiences trauma that resurfaces years later, and only Jedediah Brown, Frontier Psychologist can fix it.
Henry VIII supposedly had aroyal asswiper. I don’t care if he committed incest and infanticide while participating in satanic orgies, if you were Henry VIII’s asswiper I think you’ve earned a “get out of hell free” card.
This probably has a LOT to do with how it became customary. If the king wore a wig at court and liked eels and ice cream or whatever then the nobles started and if the nobles started then the nouveau riche commoners started and then the less riche commoners started, just as Georgian 4 over 4 mansions in America were mini-replicas of the rambling 150 room palaces of Europe. Even George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are known to have paid attention to what was in vogue in Europe by way of fashion and furniture and what-not and would scold their agents there for sending them out-of-fashion-at-court clothing and fabrics that merchants were unloading.
Good theory.
No disagreement with you on either point The OP mentioned touring old houses, though, and there are a lot more Victorian-era homes left around than anything from previous periods.
And even after then it was very difficult. One set of my great-grandparents were divorced, I guess this would’ve been mid-1920’s to early 1930’s in England. They were working class Londoners and they had to sell almost everything they owned to be able to afford to get divorced.