I love sharing a bed with my wife. I’ve been doing it for 46 years now. Not on a double bed; that is torture for me (and her, I think). It is amazing what a difference the extra 6 inches in a queen makes. I still much prefer our king, though. It is a full two feet wider than a double and that is sheer luxury, even though we each get only an extra foot.
I can’t sleep facing my wife’s front. I either have to face her back or away from her altogether.
And we each have our own comforter.
And sometimes it’s the same person!
When she was still alive I loved to listen to my grandmother tell stories, about anything really, but particularly about family history. She’d talk about when she and my grandfather were dating. One time in particular she was talking about the time surrounding when they got married. She told me how saying goodnight and parting at the end of a date made her heart ache. She could just barely wait for the time when they’d be able to spend the night together. I wish you all could hear her. She had a very distinctive style. She was all moon eyed and misty and romantic about it until the switch flipped “and then the day finally comes and you’re ready to go to sleep next to your beloved and it’s all knees and elbows. No one tells you that. You’ll see. You’re gonna wish you had a mattress with a hole dug in it for one of your arms.”
When my husband and I first got together it was easy to sleep together, spooning in a narrow dorm bed. 20 years later, there are blanket issues. I snore. For lots of reasons it’s better for us to sleep separately now.
You learn things about your partner you probably didn’t need to know.
You learn that:
They slept with brothers and were used to shoving them out of bed if they got too cozy.
They make odd body noises which disturb your sleep. Later these noises may actually signal the beginings of health problems.
They drool.
Sometimes they smell strange.
Other times they say things like, “A hammer? What do you need a hammer for”" in their sleep.
They may also steal in their sleep. Things like your pillow. Or their share of the blankies.
All told, sleeping with your partner is a true test of love.
It took me several months to get used to sharing a bed, the first time, but now I would miss sharing a bed with my SO. Yes, there are the tug of wars over blankets (my SO even occasionally blames me when all the blankets end up on the floor on HIS side of the bed), there is the constant battle to figure out where the 4th arm goes, but my absolutely favorite time is when I wake up just a little in the middle of the night, and I can lay there, mentally fuzzy, snuggled up to my SO under the warm blankets, and just sort of float. The time between going to bed and falling asleep is also when we have a number of silly “I wish” kind of conversations.
It’s miserable torture! I think it was Rousseau who said no relationship that violates your right to fart in your sleep is worth it.
I’ve never heard myself snore, so it’s clearly a lie.
Sometimes, it’s nice to reach out and feel somebody there.
Yep. People have weird sleep requirements. For instance, I must face the nearest wall as I sleep, and there may be no woman, no matter how lovely, in between. She’s gotten used to this, and she’ll cuddle up to my back sometimes, which is nice. But we’re both not-cuddly sleepers. It’s no good to mix the two.
I have heard myself snore while transitioning to being awake. Would that I could claim ignorance ( I do always deny it, though 
).
Unfortunately I have to admit I’m one of those people who doesn’t share beds well. Pre-slumber is all nice and dandy, but I’m a cold sleeper by preference. Lots of body heat next to me can really bug me after a few minutes unless I’m so exhausted I drop off quickly. Meanwhile from my end I snore like a freight train and sometimes shift around quite a bit, including in and out of the covers. I’ve had complaints ;).
C’est la vie, I guess.
This is my girlfriend. We have a king size bed, precisely because I like my space so much, but apparently it doesn’t help. Her starting position is on my side, and I have to fight every night to push her over to the near half of her side. I have to throw up knees early in the night, and turn my butt to her to get any kind of freedom from movement in my face area. Lately, she’s taken to sleeping horizontally in the bed, with her legs on top of mine. This aggression will not stand, man.
And sometimes it’s the same person at the same time!
I wish we could still sleep in bed with each other all night on a consistent basis. I love the snuggling, etc. It’s just that both of us are intermittent insomniacs and intermittent snorers. And sometimes when we are having bouts of insomnia, we can’t fall asleep if there is any sound or movement at all.
So often one or the other of us ends up in the guest bedroom, or if there are guests already sleeping there, on the couch. Thankfully, the couch is really comfortable to sleep on, perhaps even more so than the bed in the guest bedroom.
In theory I like sleeping with my SO, but the reality is I sleep much better when he isn’t in bed with me. He snores absurdly loud (I have earplugs that mostly work but aren’t comfortable), and I prefer to sprawl. I also get pretty grumpy at night. Thankfully he thinks it’s hilarious and teases me about it later. I do like waking up with him there, so the inferior sleep is usually worth it to me and he gets really sad if I camp out on the couch instead of sleeping with him.
He disagrees (of course) but I think it might actually help our relationship if we slept apart. Say, separate bedrooms. His in Denver, mine in some other state.
It was different when we were madly in love but now we’re old and grumpy and it’s just irritating. We have four pillows–one I prefer, one I hate, and two I’m neutral. He says he has no preference. So the one I prefer is always under his head, and the one I hate is always on my side. How does this even happen? I know he’s not doing it on purpose, since he can’t tell the difference, but it annoys me.
Also I am a person who has a hard time falling off the edge into sleep. I will just about be there, any little thing will disrupt the process. A snore, a sigh, if he turns over, and if that’s not enough, we usually have a cat in bed with us.
Why?
My answer is, I like when he is in the house with me (he works nights so is gone a lot) but not necessarily in bed with me. I sleep better when he is home but one of us is in the bed and one on the couch. If we had a bigger bed my answer might be different.
It really depends on the person. My college boyfriend couldn’t stand any kind of cuddling, not even a hand on his shoulder. He claimed it was because he had broken so many bones. :dubious: I dealt with it, but sharing a bed with no contact is hard.
My ex-husband didn’t mind snuggling, but he had sleep issues. He snored. He kicked and moved around like a kid. He was known to scream in his sleep. And, during the night, he rolled himself up like a burrito in the blankets leaving me with nothing. To top it all off, we couldn’t agree on whether or not the flat sheet should be tucked in or not.
My current SO is my perfect sleeping partner. He likes to snuggle as much as I do, which is some but not all night. He makes a great pillow when I fall asleep with my head on his shoulder. We spoon in the mornings when neither of us wants to get up. There’s some blanket stealing, but it’s manageable. If he’s snoring, I can tell him to roll over and he does, which usually stops the snoring. I’m not to the point where I can’t sleep without him, but it’s definitely better when he’s there.
Plus, as Tastes of Chocolate said, the moments before you fall asleep are often the best conversations.
Cozy.
It’s really hard to describe really. With sweetie when we share a bed, we manage to be good with the blanket stealing (none) but I sometimes end up inching closer and closer to him (I don’t mean too push him out of bed!) and sometimes he snores, I’m told I snore some (but not enough for him to wake me). We can snuggle a bit but tend to our side of the bed as he is a furnace and I get too warm sometimes.
I miss him when he goes back home (different cities for now, soon same city but will be different households) and I am in my bed alone again, but not so much I can’t sleep.
Can’t share a bed with my son. I either wake up in the middle of the night with a knee or elbow poking somewhere uncomfortable or he steals all the covers AND he snores. Silly boy.
That would be me.
I’m also a kicker. And I wiggle.
I’ve only slept with one person, and she not recently or often. So I don’t have a lot of experience on this. Certainly it was not enough time to become accustomed to each other.
So… I dunno. Apparently I snore, but not like my friend who visited last weekend and slept in the other room and could still be heard through two doors. I miss cuddling, and sometimes I fantasize to waking up to a friendly smile, but in real life, it would probably be waking up to a half-asleep groan and morning breath…
It depends on the person. Some people are nice to sleep with, and others not so much. I’m generally a three minute snuggle then off to sleep person and I’ve spent many a miserable night with snugglers that I didn’t want to be snuggling with, but there are exceptions.
As KennerTheGreat mentioned, I usually can’t sleep facing anyone, but off the top of my head I can think of three people that I can sleep happily with facing and wrapped around each other. We just fit. Probably not coincidentally, they were all people I was delighted to wake up with. There are a few more people that I’m happy to spoon* with (and all three of the aforementioned wrappers are also excellent spooners).
Of course, none of these people are or were an all-night-every-night deal, or I might well have reached the “No seriously, get off me” point. But since I usually reach the “No seriously, get off me” point about 5 minutes after orgasm, they still bear mention.
*Oh, and approximately 99 times out of 100, I’ll only spoon facing away. This is partly because it’s awkward to spoon someone who’s bigger than you, and partly because I need air, dammit, but mostly it’s because I’m a facing-away kind of person. If I actually roll over and spoon facing a guy, you can just go ahead and assume I’m crazy in love.