My husband and I haven’t slept together in over a decade, and we’re still happily married.
Sleeping separately began during my then 4-year-old daughter’s bout with cancer. My husband volunteered to sleep in the guest room and get up to give her medicines throughout the night. A pang of guilt made me hesitate for a second. Partly because it didn’t seem fair, and partly because the decision felt like a reflection on my roles as a good wife and caring mother. But I was an edgy, sleep-deprived zombie, so I quickly agreed.
“Just for now,” I promised. And meant it.
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The first few nights, I lay half-awake waiting for one of our daughters to call me or for my husband to creep in with a question. But they didn’t. When my alarm went off in the morning, I wanted to cry. Not because I hadn’t slept well, but because I had.
As the days rolled into weeks, “our” bedroom became my sanctuary. With the door closed and the chaos of the world on the other side of it, I could breathe. My self-help books and novels balanced on both nightstands, and my blue yoga mat was allowed to stay along the foot of the bed. I filled journals, flipped through magazines, and examined rogue hairs on my chin. My sound machine hummed and the air conditioning blasted. When I was restless, I watched Call the Midwife or read a book with the light on. Night after night, I slept uninterrupted in “our” big bed feeling anything but lonely.
My mornings became magical in my own space. I threw up the shades, flushed the toilet, made the bed (that my husband never did), played something from my Spotify list, and watched the birds while I brushed my teeth. These were little freedoms that turned out to be really big, and allowed me to start the day focused on myself.
Before my daughter got sick, it didn’t even occur to me that my husband and I could sleep in separate beds. Most nights he crawled into bed after midnight, which woke me up. I’d lay awake and run through a list of to-dos, while listening to him snoring and the incessant pinging of his phone notifications. Every night I’d suffer through because after all, what was the alternative? But by morning, I was ready to kill him. I’d unknowingly pick arguments about any number of things, including his dirty mouth guard on the bed stand or the clothes he left sprawled on our bed.
“It’s hard to be a good partner when you’re sleep-starved,” says Wendy Troxel, author of Sharing the Covers and senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation. “You become moody, and you’re more prone to depression and to engage in conflict. Sleep isn’t only necessary for your individual health, well-being and productivity, but also vital for the health of your relationship.”
It was. Now when my husband came in the kitchen every morning for coffee, I looked forward to seeing him. “How’d you sleep?” was the first thing we asked one another. “Wonderful!” I’d say, and if for some reason I didn’t sleep well, he had nothing to do with it. It made me love him more.
The weeks rolled into months, then after a year and a half of sleeping apart, my husband asked, “When am I coming back to the big bed?” I let the words hang in our kitchen for several seconds. My heart pounded. The question was inevitable, but still, I wasn’t ready. The well-rested version of me was a better woman, and a happier one.
“Soon,” I said, not meaning it, and biding a little time.
As I saw it, we were benefiting from the best of both worlds: sleep and sex. Weekend nights after we put the girls to bed, we binged Netflix in my bed. Sometimes we listened to music, sipped tequila, and romanticized about where we’d go when we weren’t at soccer games or birthday parties. Sex wasn’t always a part of it, but we were having more now than when we slept in the same bed. The more I slept, the more I was up for sex and it didn’t feel like just another thing to do. Plus, as I found out in my spare time in bed alone, an extra hour of sleep for women results in a 14 percent increase in sexual frequency, and our relationship was benefiting from that. Didn’t he realize how lucky he was?
But, no, at the time, my husband saw it differently. Our daughter's health had improved. He felt it was time for him to sleep in “our” bed, where he “belonged,” he said. But I just couldn’t.
A recent YouGov survey of more than 12,000 adults found only two-thirds of Americans want to share a bed with their partner. Yet, many continue to, in part, because of a social construct that’s based more on fashion than facts.
“We allow society to come into our bedroom and dictate what may or may not be working for a couple,” Troxel says. “It’s crazy because none of it is backed in science.”
Back in the 1800s, couples slept apart because of concerns about hygiene, as part of the Domestic Sanitation Movement, when society at the time became obsessed with cleanliness in an effort to prevent the spread of epidemic disease. Then in the 1900s, marital advice author and birth control advocate Marie Stopes came along, rallying against sleeping separately, saying that it was endangering the happiness of the modern married couple. It took a while, but by the 1950s, separate beds indeed started to be seen as a sign of a distant or failing marriage. When priorities and values shifted in the 1960s, younger couples cemented this idea and started to view separate beds as a symbol of complete dysfunction in the marriage, and sleeping apart fell totally out of vogue.
My husband, a part of the sleeping-together-is-awesome ideology, was still having his doubts, letting societal views mar the beautiful reality of what was actually happening in our marriage. One Sunday afternoon, now two years after we slumber-ly departed, we sat on the wooden floor of my bedroom and shared our concerns about sleeping together and sleeping apart. Mine: I didn’t want to go back to sleeping next to him, because I was happier and no longer cranky and resentful. His: He didn’t want to be known as that couple whose marriage lacked intimacy and eventually fell apart.
“I get it,” I said. But, I explained, sleeping apart wasn’t a sign that our relationship was on the rocks; rather, it was a sign that we had an open, healthy, and communicative relationship—one that had improved when we stopped sleeping in the same bed. It was actually a sign of strength.
And it was. It didn’t suck the romance out of it; it held us accountable to each other. Our time together felt more intentional than planned. It embodied the best parts of our relationship: the laughing, touching, and connection. We left the chaos and strain of kids, work, and who was taking the dog to the vet to be hashed out outside of the bedroom.
Says Ken Page, psychotherapist and host of the Deeper Dating podcast, “How you handle sleep issues in a relationship is how you’re going to handle every other charged issue in your couple hood. Communication becomes key.”
Maybe sleeping apart isn’t forever. But it is for now. We’ll continue to have open and honest conversations about it, in a loving and respectful way. Then we’ll retire to our rooms for a good night’s sleep.
