Happiness is—
Sleeping in separate rooms?
One of the best things for a marriage, in my opinion?…separate rooms. Being able to sleep alone can be relaxing, healthy and less stressful than sharing a bed. It shouldn’t be taken personally that someone might want to make love with you, but not necessarily want to actually sleep with you, though falling asleep together is most enjoyable. The point is that sleeping together, literally, can be uncomfortable and confining. You shouldn’t have to sleep together, just because you’re married, or living together. —Rose
We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations – we’re doing everything we can to keep our marriage together. —Rodney Dangerfield
From Red
Twenty years ago a change of jobs meant we getting up an hour earlier than before. This had my wife complaining so I transferred to another room, returning to the marriage bed for Friday and Saturday nights, often enjoying some great sex. After a few months of sleeping alone my wife began to come to my room. Not just walk in and climb into bed with me for a quickie. She’d make a production of it and dress up in bra, panties, stockings and for twenty minutes or so my wife was a hooker, resulting in both of us enjoying some of the most wonderful, energetic, physical, sex of our marriage.
In sleeping apart we had in fact re-discovered the joy of sex and, for a short while, we did a bit of light swinging with some like-minded marrieds. We are now both retired, sleeping together but just as interested in sex as ever, my wife still enjoys dressing in basque and stockings for sex on those special occasions!
From Anonymous
I spent over 30 years in a marriage with little sex, little relaxed physical intimacy. And now I’m many years into a very different kind of relationship. While we don’t have as much “sex”, as in intercourse, et. al. as either of us would prefer, we love being in touch as we fall asleep. The trouble comes in the early morning hours, when we begin to snuggle. We must have a 100 different ways we twine together, and we hate getting up. We snooze, and talk, and snooze some more. It might be the best, most regular sex I’ve ever had. I don’t know what it is, some kind of electrical charge where we contact, but we get up feeling so refreshed and relaxed and loving. It’s truly wonderful, for us. Lucky us!
From Stacy
My hubby and I have been married almost 20 years and have rarely slept apart…until his snoring drove me to the couch. I had to put an alarm clock in the living room to make sure I would be awake for work in the morning. We both hated it so much that I decided to try earplugs to see if it would help. The first few nights, I hated those earplugs…they felt so weird in my ears…but I finally got used to them. Now, I use them every night (I find I can’t sleep without them) and we now sleep side by side, spooned together tight. Happy ending!
From Anonymous
I love sleeping alone. I don’t sleep well. I have insomnia. Even in the most perfect of conditions I toss and turn. This has been most of my life. When I dated I didn’t let anyone sleep over. Now I am married and have tried more times then I can count for us to sleep together. It just doesn’t work. He snores like a freight train and I usually land up on the sofa. When I’m not able to sleep I keep him awake with constantly moving around, I really want my own bedroom and he’s not happy about it. Nothing is stopping either of us from joining the other. I’m planning to convert our computer room into a bedroom. I’m looking forward to my won space.
From Anonymous
Although my wife decided she doesn’t want me to touch her at all, I still find it comforting and necessary to have her in the same bed with me. It’s a king size bed and we can sleep without touching quite easily. I find it quite erotic to look over and see her masturbate while she thinks I’m asleep. I often wonder if she watches me. When I travel, I find it hard to sleep in Hotel rooms alone no matter how comfortable the bed.
From Anonymous
I spend more time than I would like, sleeping alone. For the most part, this is because I usually spend more than a hundred nights a year in hotel rooms. That is not the whole story. I have a separate room at home and we often sleep apart. I tell myself that there are many good reasons for this: my wife is only two thirds of my weight so getting a mattress that works for both of us is difficult, I fall asleep instantly and generate a lot of heat and noise but I don’t sleep for long, usually five to six hours, whereas my wife takes ages to go to sleep, is easy to wake and needs at least eight hours sleep. We are also both quite introspective people who need time alone.
Nevertheless, I sometimes wonder if, by being pragmatic and sensible and acknowledging the differences in our requirements, we have lost something. We have been together for more than thirty years now. I remember vividly the joy I used to feel when we first slept together. I loved the intimacy of it, warts and all: the shared warmth, the trust, the tactile stimulation, the deep knowledge of each other’s bodies, the sense of connection, of shared purpose, of physical unity, of shutting out the world, of creating “us”. I loved to wake early and watch her sleep. I loved the feel of her curled up against me in a way that said: “I desire nothing more than I have.” It was, in many ways, more an expression of love than the sex that we shared.
So now I visit her room and wait for her to fall asleep or take her away on pagan weekends. The love is still there. The expression is different. We are different.
From Oxartes
Mrs. Oxartes and I sleep apart (but in the same bed; we’re just careful not totouch each other) 12 days every month, since orthodox Jewish couples will abstain from physical contact, including sex, for the 5 days of the wife’s period and the seven days immediately afterwards every month. Leaving aside the fact that we donot have sexual relations during this time, my wife and I both find thatwe like, and even look forward, being able to plop down & sleep byourselves. Nothing against Mrs. Oxartes, but I just like sleeping all by myselfsometimes and I know she does too. It’s natural and, I think, even healthy.
From Pat
I totally agree that it isn’t necessarily natural or comfortable for everyone to share a bed with someone when the goal is sleep, rather than fun. I think it must have taken me at least 8 or nine years to really become comfortable sleeping with my husband in the bed with me. The biggest bed we ever had was a queen. I would have much preferred a king. I can’t sleep at all if someone is touching me. I usually would like a bit of cuddling before sleeping, but when it came time to sleep, I always turned my back and put some space between us. I’m a light sleeper too, so if he decided to cuddle during the night, it always woke me up.
I’m so much happier and sleep so much better when alone in my own bed. I’ve been doing it for about 12 years now and I’ve promised myself that if I ever get into a live-in arrangement with another man, we’ll have to have separate bedrooms…although one will probably have a larger bed for playtime.
From Rose
My husband and I started sleeping apart, about six years ago, when his arthritis (the osteo kind) became so bad that he had to have two or three body pillows propped up around him so that he could actually fall asleep without something hurting. Well, that didn’t exactly leave a whole lot of room for me, so I’d spend the night unrelaxed in about 1/4 or 1/3 of the bed trying not to move or disturb him too much. Both of us snore and he had some issues with sleep apnea. It just got to the point where, probably five of six nights a week, neither of us was getting a decent night’s sleep and that was resulting in fatigue, irritability, lack of focus, and increased depression.
I think it’s somewhat unnatural to sleep with someone else’s arms and/or legs draped over you or trying to sleep fit up close against them. At least that’s how it feels to me. Even an arm draped over me feels so heavy on me. A leg draped over me is positively confining. And most of the time, being up close and personal just gets too hot. And I don’t mean hot in a good way. I mean like having to throw off the covers because it’s too damned hot from the other person’s body heat. I do like spooning to start, when it’s a little chilly in the room, but once the body heat warms up the undercover space, it’s,”Okay, enough of that,” and I want to feel unencumbered by body parts that aren’t mine, so I can actually fall asleep.
For the first twenty or twenty-five years I was married, I bought into that idea that if you didn’t sleep together, there was something wrong with the relationship, even though my husband never expressed any such belief. I think he would have been perfectly content having separate rooms, or at the very least separate beds, all along.
From Malcolm
Life is funny. We have separate houses under the same roof, but we sleep together 99% of the time. I have to have really annoyed her for her to move back to her own place. Using my bed means that hers, upstairs, is available for the frequent friends/guests who stay with us. (We have four double beds and a few bunks in the house.) She has sleep apnoea and I have to cope with the CPAP machine and breathing mask, but she’s also had heart trouble in the night and I’ve had to get the ambulance to take her to hospital.
We DO have separate kitchens, computers, and phone lines. Not to mention our own space in our own houses with our own books, furniture and so on. We can each have our own friends to visit without having to share or impose them on the other. Of course we also have mutual friends as well as relatives visiting from our families.
This works very well for us, and people have said they’d like to try it. But building the space to make it possible can be expensive.