In my fantasy world, someone from the New York Times read my blog post about the challenges some couples face trying to share a bed and thought, “That’s brilliant! We should write about that!”
It could have happened.*
My friend Lisa Gauchey pointed out a recent Times story headlined Married, but Sleeping Alone.
The marital bed, once the symbol of American matrimony on a par with the diamond ring, the tiered wedding cake and his-and-hers martinis, is threatened with extinction. “Till Death Do Us Part” is fast becoming “Till Sleep Do Us Part.”
Separate sleepers cite a bevy of reasons for their habit, including apnea, restless leg syndrome, his insistence on watching “SportsCenter,” her need to get up early for yoga. As Barbara Tober, the former chairwoman of the Museum of Arts and Design, told The New York Times recently, “Not that we don’t love each other, but at a certain point you just want your own room.”
“What happened in the last decade,” said Dr. Meir Kryger, a sleep specialist at Gaylord Hospital in Connecticut, “is that people are suddenly making their own sleep a priority. If their rest is being impaired by their partner, the attitude now is that I don’t have to put up with this.”
The Times had 62 comments on this story last time I looked.
But when Theresa Giarrusso at the Atlanta Journal Constitution actually did like my post — in which I wrote about our solution, two twin beds pushed together on a king frame — and wrote a blog post based on it, she generated more than 100 comments.
Where you sleep and who you sleep with clearly inspires some interest.
*To be fair, my post was inspired by the Washington Post, which quoted the same 2005 National Sleep Foundation study that the Times did. So all things are connected.
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