Dear Fiona,
I’m really struggling with sleeping at the moment. I’ve recently got married, and it’s the first time I’ve lived continuously with someone, and it’s blissful in every way but this one thing, and that’s that everything wakes me up – if my husband comes to bed later than me, if he gets up earlier than me, if he starts snoring, if he rolls over and touches me. Literally, everything, and it’s making me more and more tired and more and more anxious about being able to sleep which means I don’t sleep, and on and on. I think the answer might be separate bedrooms, at least some of the time. The thing is that we’ve only been married for ten months, and I am a little concerned: is this going to spell the end? I know that the House & Garden team gets extraordinary access into how people live – have you come across couples who sleep apart, but are happily married? (Aside from members of our royal family?)
I’m also worried about judgement; my mother thinks it’s a terrible idea and that I should just suck up any discomfort, reckoning that I will get used to it and telling me that it’s symptomatic of my having got married so late (I’m in my forties), and my father is similarly aghast even though his parents had separate bedrooms (but I think maybe their relationship wasn’t one to aspire to. Maybe it was the separate bedrooms? See point one, again.) Anyway, with familial disapproval in mind, I wondered if you’ve got any tips on how to disguise the situation? For we’re about to start renovating a house – is there anything clever I can do with layout? Someone suggested a dressing room – but it seems mean to relegate him to a single bed there – for a double bed there might look obvious? Maybe I could have a single bed in my dressing room? Is a single bed too tragic at my age? My husband is on board incidentally – he agrees that I need to get more sleep!
Thank you so much,
Love,
A Very Light Sleeper XX
Dear Light Sleeper,
Thank you for your letter, concerning an issue with which I empathise. In fact, before we go any further, I should tell you that 15 years into our marriage, my husband and I are currently (very contentedly) each sleeping alone – because together, I don’t sleep, to the extent that I now understand why sleep deprivation is such an effective form of torture. There are a few strands to your letter, but to get straight into one of the early questions, I can confirm that we’re not the only ones. We’ve got friends who sleep separately, and, yes, among the House & Garden team’s travels into other people’s set-ups, we’ve encountered more than a few his and hers (or theirs and theirs) bedrooms in what are, to all other appearances, blissfully happy unions. There’s a technical term for it, a ‘sleep divorce’ – which I’m less keen on for I feel it has negative connotations (even if Cameron Diaz has been very enthusiastic about it). If you want hard figures, a recent study discovered that 10% of cohabiting couples sleep apart, and a further 6% would like to but fear the consequences. Another study has shown that we sleep better, and for longer, without another person in the bed. Which leads me to wonder if the more pertinent question isn’t why on earth are we expected to share a bed in the first place? And, alongside, why are separate bedrooms judged to be a symptom of a failing relationship?
Of course, we all know the answer to the first part. That conjugal bed sharing is the norm owes both to the sacred and the profane – or, more specifically, the church and household budget. The church comes into it because in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas ordained that “the couple must have their bed and their bed chamber”, a statement linked to what he believed to be the fundamental essence of marriage, namely, the act of procreation and the raising of children (in the Christian faith.) Aiding him in his mission was that then, beds were expensive, and so was any form of heating – so much so that we northern Europeans habitually practiced communal sleeping. Take romantic partners out of it for a moment; for thousands of years, it was completely normal to get tucked up next to friends, relatives, colleagues – even people you’d never previously met. If you’ve been to the British galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum you might have spotted the Great Bed of Ware, originally acquired for an inn in Hertfordshire. One night in 1689, it hosted 52 people sleeping, at the same time. We might think it sounds gross but it wasn’t considered so then – also, how did any of them sleep? (I have teenage memories of sleeping very badly with a similar number of people on mattresses dragged onto the floor of a marquee, for at least half of them snored terribly, but I did discover just what an impediment being cold is to sleeping well).
You mention the royal family – who, you’re right, generally haven’t shared bedrooms with their spouses. But our kings and queens had sleeping companions, and Richard the Lionheart became such good friends with Philip II of France that in 1187 they, at least once, slept alongside each other, in the same bed, and it’s not thought that there was any erotic subtext. It was also normal practice, apparently, to chit chat and swap stories long into the night, and to wake each other up to discuss dreams and nightmares, for which I can totally see the appeal (and is possibly why my husband is so enjoying having the option of a room of his own.)
But there has been a prior break in that communal practice – and it wasn’t long ago. In fact, from the latter half of the 19th century until almost 1970, if they had the space, couples slept apart, whether in separate rooms or separate beds. It coincided with the industrial revolution, the rise of a new middle class who could afford to keep warm without resorting to a bedfellow, and the invention of the printing press which made books readily accessible and took away the need for late night entertainment from a co-sleeper. Sealing the deal was an extraordinarily influential tome, catchily entitled Sleep, by an American physician called William Whitty Hall – it’s still available to read now, should you wish to – which suggested that sharing a bed was unhygienic, unhealthy, and immoral. Nicky Haslam, in his hugely enjoyable autobiography, Redeeming Features: A Memoir, even moots the idea that then, double beds were considered common; at least, he thinks his parents thought so – and do note all the single beds at Charleston Farmhouse. As by the mid-19th century we’d been a protestant country for almost 250 years, less heed was paid to Thomas Aquinas than might have been – and besides, babies were still born (potentially, Thomas Aquinas didn’t have much of an imagination.)
So that might have stayed the case – but for Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which says that for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Plus, there was a sexual revolution fuelled by the introduction of the contraceptive pill (1960) and duvets (1964), the outcome of which was that we tumbled back into sharing a bed with our partners, and even – for those who practice attachment parenting – our children. It seemed liberating and loving, and a rebuttal to the residual rationing and gloom of the decades that had come before, not to mention the serious collective trauma suffered by way of the Second World War. And this is where I come back to your letter, when I say that some of that generation might be a bit horrified that we, their children, are now looking for night-time autonomy. They might see it as a sort of regression, and they might feel particularly concerned if their parents slept alone and, as you hint, that marriage wasn’t an outward expression of unfettered joy.
But what you need to understand is that while they’re doubtlessly coming from a place of love, not everybody feels the way that your parents do. Times have changed again: different Netflix programmes can’t be simultaneously yet companionably enjoyed in the way that different books can (though I suppose you could use headphones), and, while once upon a time a wife’s sleep was thought less important than a husband’s – “if it’s interrupted, she can take it in the daytime,” reasoned Whitty Hall, back in 1859 – these days, chances are that any woman reading this has a job that requires them to have had sufficient sleep the night before. (Unless of course they’re part of the trad wife movement – but even then, I would have thought that taking care of seven children and baking fresh bread daily requires maintaining a mood and attitude that relies on being well rested.) To which end “I always see separate bedrooms as a luxury that does not necessarily define a fractious relationship, rather a pragmatic choice for those who have the space,” says Philip Hooper, joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. Others go further: Francis Sultana is of the belief that far from signifying misery, separate bedrooms – and indeed bathrooms – are an essential ingredient for a happy marriage. And then there are all those I mention in the first paragraph, including me.
So let’s move on to how you address it, which is the final part of your letter. For yes, there are ways and means – and sleeping separately doesn’t have to be a permanent state of affairs, either. On occasion, for instance, you might want to watch the same series on Netflix (I can recommend Ripley, if you haven’t yet started) or there may be times when maximising your sleep seems less vital – for I should mention that one of the surveys I cited earlier did also say that couples do feel closer after sleeping in the same bed. If such a half in-half out arrangement is your plan then you may not need two bedrooms, “perhaps instead a boudoir or sulking room or a dressing room with a day bed,” suggests Philip, where, if you are short of space or determined not to give the game away, a single bed need not look ‘tragic’. You could design the room in such a way as to effect a rather charming box or nook bed. Nicky Haslam’s parents had single four posters which is very chic, and I recently came across Francois-Xavier Lalanne’s Seagull Canopy Bed which I so covet that I’d swap it for my King-sized berth in a heartbeat. But, if you toss and turn a lot, an occasional double (which is wider than a single but not as big as a full double) might be more comfortable – and that can still be put in a nook.
Alternatively, you could own the situation – which you might feel more comfortable doing having read all the above – and see it as an opportunity. “From a decorating point of view, separate rooms often solve the conundrum of making spaces which are better suited to one partner or another,” points out Philip. He mentions a client “who wanted his room to be like a William Morris thicket while his wife wanted a chintz flower garden; both were achieved successfully whereas a hybrid would have been a poor compromise.” He also mentions those clients’ five children – and I stand by my observation concerning Thomas Aquinas’s imagination, and the fact that just because you each have a bedroom, you don’t have to use both all the time. And, know that a second, beautifully decorated bedroom would work as an occasional guest room. At Charleston Farmhouse, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell decorated each other’s rooms, which seems incredibly romantic – and evidently proved so, for they had a daughter together even though Grant usually preferred the company of his fellow men. (My husband and I have merged these approaches, incidentally, in that his current bedroom is technically a guest bedroom, which I have decorated according to my tastes.)
I hope that this helps, and I hope that you feel able to do what you need to achieve a good night’s sleep – or five – soon. And do please make it soon, for it’s amazing how quickly not being able to sleep becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as you have discovered – and I know, first hand, that that way lies madness. Avoiding that is far more important than avoiding the imagined (or even real) judgement of others.
With love,
Fiona XX
