There was a moment last year, when my husband and I were making some changes to our house, when we discussed the possibility of separate bedrooms. He occasionally snores – sometimes a bit, sometimes badly – or comes home late. Or I wake up with midnight terrors and thrash about, or have a coughing fit and my husband says, “*Tut*I’m awake now,” and I say, “Don’t tut at me!” and so on. Perhaps separate rooms was the answer.
But the conversation trailed off and we still share one big room, with a slightly nicer spare room than we previously had, for emergencies. My husband dislikes sleeping on his own (although the cat is sometimes an acceptable substitute); I find him useful in the middle of the night for the aforementioned terrors and also when it is cold. There is also an unspoken fear between us that goes: separate rooms, separate lives, divorce.
But we are wrong! This week, Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford University, urged couples who sleep badly in the same room to see moving to separate rooms as “the beginning of a new relationship”. Sleep is so important, he said, that if you improve the hours you’re getting, you will be in a better mood and your marriage will magically improve.
It is true that sleep is a sort of glue that holds us together – our bedrock of sanity and therefore all of our relationships. It’s no wonder that many marriages suffer the greatest during the no-sleep, small-children years. Being consistently tired drives you mad. And the things that you do and say when you are tired can linger and fester.
So moving rooms is surely the answer. And yet there remains a social stigma around it, that it is somehow unsexy or unromantic or a sign of deeper resentments. Like it doesn’t matter how much you are snapping at each other during the day, fuming and resentful over snoring and duvet-stealing: as long as you repair to the same bed at the end of the night, to huddle grimly on separate cliff-edges of the mattress, all is well.
Susannah Howard, 39, has two small children and says that she usually starts out in the same bed as her husband but leaves at the first sound of a snore. “I do not know how people cope sleeping next to a snorer, it drives me insane. Life is tiring enough without taking an opportunity to sleep quietly when you can!”
Lisa Bullock, 43, has been sleeping in a separate bedroom from her husband for the last two years. “It is honestly the best decision we’ve ever made – my health and fitness has improved (because I’m not using poor food choices to boost my energy throughout the day, and I feel I can commit to a proper exercise routine again). It’s also really improved our relationship. I felt so resentful of him, the night-time anger and upset bled through into the next day. Now we both sleep, we talk more and are motivated to spend quality time together.”
But she has experienced the slight social taboo of it. “I still feel weird when I tell people, though – I get different reactions from proper full-on pearl clutching to people seeming to pity us – when it’s the nuts.”
Karen Cunningham, 56, was an early adopter to this arrangement and has been sleeping separately from her husband for the last 20 years. “And we’ve got a bathroom each,” she says. “It’s probably one of the things that allowed us to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary this year. My husband took up insomnia like it was a national sport shortly after we got together and he snores. He says I do, too, but I prefer to call it fairy whispering. No plans to change the arrangement anytime soon. It’s bliss.”
Susanna Abse, the couples’ therapist and author of Tell Me The Truth About Love, thinks that separate bedrooms can be part of a healthy relationship if the move is managed properly.
“You need to be a couple who has already established a good base of intimacy,” she says. “The move can’t be about rejection or wanting to avoid sex.”
The couples I spoke to often mentioned that husbands did feel rejected by the suggestion of separate rooms. How can the conversation be started without triggering this? “You can’t avoid some level of rejection,” says Abse. “Moving rooms is the recognition that you want to preserve your sleep over that physical proximity and couples have to work through the disappointment. It’s usually quite a long process of mourning and negotiation”.
The stereotype of the separate-room couples is a post-kids, post-romance type scene, but Lucy Sieghart, 27, and her boyfriend, who is 35, totally buck this trend as they have almost never shared a bed. “We often find ourselves defending our situation to appalled friends at dinner parties, but I genuinely wouldn’t have it any other way,” says Lucy. “When we do share a bed, on holiday or when staying with friends, neither of us sleeps as well.
“When we were first dating and just staying over for a night at our respective houses, one of us would always sneak off to the spare room at around 1am. We found it funny to start with, and then when he asked me to move in, my first question was ‘Can I have my own room?’ It was very equal. I think that’s quite unusual as in most couples I know who don’t share a bed, there’s always one who doesn’t like it, but that’s definitely not how it feels for us.”
Perhaps millennials like Lucy are just far better at saying what they want in a relationship – or aren’t beholden to ancient stereotypes of what a relationship ought to look like.
However, you choose to negotiate a separate room situation, says Abse, you have to be careful to protect those pillow-talk moments that you might miss by going solo. “Couples can get lazy about preserving that quiet time together. And in bed sometimes important conversations can happen – particularly in the dark where things are relaxed and non-confrontational.”
One couple I spoke to always spent Saturday and Sunday mornings in the same bed, reading the papers and chatting. Jo Teacher, who is 44, tells me that she makes a conscious effort to have awake bed-cuddling-time with her husband to offset any sense of un-coupling. “We all often pile in together in bed with the kids on the weekend,” she says. “And I try to sleep in the same bed with him on the weekend as I know he loves it and loves to cuddle.”
And of course there’s the question of sex. All the separate-room couples I spoke to said that moving rooms either had no impact on their sex life or a positive one. “Once I was no longer exhausted and furious with my husband,” says Teacher, “I actually found I got my libido back.”
Many couples with busy lives and children find themselves having to schedule sex anyway, so the idea that sleeping in the same bed somehow causes spontaneous sex is really a moot point.
Of course, having the choice to sleep in a separate bedroom is a massive luxury not available to all – even if they are dying to escape the marital bed.
Victoria Kennedy, 46, is waiting for her fixed-rate mortgage to end in 2.5 years so that she can move to a larger house in order to have her own bedroom. “My husband snores so loudly, it’s like sleeping next to a freight train,” she says. “He refuses to do anything about it. Sleep is a necessity, so I sleep next to my daughter instead, in her double bed, in her bedroom. She’s absolutely made up with this arrangement as she is scared of the dark.
“Now I don’t lie awake next to my husband thinking up ways to murder him as he thunders through the night, I’m so much happier. My husband worries people will think we are weird, but I don’t care. I can’t sleep in the same room as my daughter forever, though, so I spend my days looking at Rightmove dreaming of a bedroom of my own.”
