I always thought it was normal for couples to sleep together: until I didn’t. For the first 55 years of our marriage, my wife and I slept together – first in a double bed, then in a queen bed and finally in a king bed. Of course, before our marriage, it was the occasional single bed!
Frankly, it never crossed my mind that we wouldn’t always sleep in the same bed in the same bedroom – even though when sleeping together there were various practical sleep-loss problems related to snoring, heavy breathing, having the “right” amount of covers on the bed, and having the bedroom at the “right” temperature.
John and Liz Baker, wide awake.
My ingrained assumption about the normalcy of sleeping together in the one bed in the one room meant that when friends mentioned they slept in separate bedrooms, I am embarrassed to admit that I wondered if something was wrong with their relationship. Maybe, I thought, they aren’t as close as we are.
It’s certainly not the relationship norm portrayed in popular culture. Indeed, as regular viewers of the British TV program Escape to the Country – which we watch to relive our upbringing in the English countryside – I don’t recall ever seeing a couple look for a house with separate bedrooms for each of them.
In early-2023, my arthritis necessitated a hip-replacement operation, so my wife and I decided to sleep apart for a few weeks until the new hip had settled down. She moved into our guest bedroom.
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After a few weeks, neither of us was showing any inclination to move back together. After a month or so, we both somewhat sheepishly admitted that we slept much better by ourselves in separate bedrooms, so we decided to try sleeping separately for another few months.
As it happened, a few weeks before my hip replacement, I had seen a geriatrician about my memory which I had been concerned was worsening more than I thought it should be doing, and which I feared might be the early onset of dementia. (It appears from subsequent developments that the issue was probably largely an over-active imagination on my part.)
My geriatrician advised that one beneficial action I could take was to make sure I always got a really good night’s sleep. After scoring a 14 on the Epworth Sleep Test questionnaire – equated with moderate excessive daytime sleepiness – she referred me for an overnight sleep test. However, because of the hip-replacement operation, I held off on the test until my new hip had settled down and I was back to more normal sleep patterns.
