My Wife and I Sleep in Separate Beds
Statistics say that up to a third of married couples do this, but you rarely hear anybody talk about it.
When I was a kid I spent an unhealthy amount of time watching Nick at Night. Sometime around 9 pm, Nickelodeon would stop showing cartoons and various programs featuring slime to show reruns of sitcoms from the 1950s and ‘60s for reasons that never quite made since to me, but it was probably because they were cheap to syndicate. We’re talking “My Three Sons,” “Leave It To Beaver,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and many other programs that were off the air well before I was born.
Lots of things were sort of confusing to a kid growing up in the ‘90s. Why is there a dude bringing them milk every day? Who would want to catch frogs when they can play Super Mario Bros.? Why are the parents sleeping in separate beds?
“This isn’t how parents are supposed to sleep,” I thought. “Parents sleep in an enormous bed. Everybody knows this.”
Even an 8-year-old like me judged Ward and June Cleaver as losers for sleeping separately. Little did I know that many decades later I’d be writing an article championing the concept.
Now, please do not think that my wife and I own dual twin beds (or bunk beds!) or some nonsense like that. We have a queen-sized bed that takes up the bulk of our apartment’s far too-tiny bedroom and we happily use it on the weekends/when we don’t have shit to do the next day. But when it comes to actually getting restful sleep, we go together like toothpaste and orange juice.