By Bettina Musall
Photo/Corbis
Can sleeping in separate beds help marriages survive?
He snores, she suffers. But many couples insist on sleeping together because they worry that having separate beds will lead to emotional distance. Still, scientists say, they are ignoring findings that say that being well-rested — rather than cuddling — might be a whole lot more important for a healthy marriage.
It was the early ’80s. Protesters were marching on the nuclear power plants in Brokdorf and Gorleben, Nena was singing about her 99 red balloons, and Bayern Munich was the German football league champion for the nth time. It was also the time when Lucy and Jürgen assembled their first double bed in their home near Stuttgart. The wooden flat-pack model from a certain Swedish furniture company was just a snug 140 centimeters (55 inches) across. They covered it in shiny satin sheets as purple as Lucy’s T-shirt-cum-nightie, and Jürgen would simply drop his thin leather tie on the floor before hopping into bed. After all, they were living in sin.
Almost 30 years, one house purchase, several extramarital affairs and two children later, their one-time love nest has been demoted to a basement guest bed. Upstairs, in the master bedroom, they may now have graduated to a king-size mattress, but Lucy only sleeps in brief intervals. The children are partly to blame; even though they are eight and 10 years old, they still try to sneak into their parents’ bed. But the main reason is Jürgen’s ear-piercing snoring, which is interrupted — albeit briefly and rarely — by disconcerting apnea.
It’s been a long time since things were wild between them. In fact, their relationship is rather silent, and Lucy sometimes even fantasizes about getting a divorce. But separate beds? “No way,” she says emphatically. “Just think of the children. And what would we have in common anymore?”
Marital Bliss Ends in the Bedroom
Good question. What sounds like a case of borderline marital strife is actually an everyday saga in the average German bedroom.
No matter how battle-scarred a marriage or relationship may be, bed-sharing is an expression of a bond that flies in the face of everything that scientists and counselors say we should do to sleep healthily and maintain marital bliss. Still, despite the scientific evidence, about half of all couples that share a bed insist that they sleep better that way.
Now, though, researchers at the University of Vienna’s sleep laboratory have confirmed the claim of Loriot, a leading German humorist, who has said that men and women simply don’t belong together — even when they’re unconscious.
The Viennese somnologists have left few stones unturned in their investigations of how people sleep. Doctors, biologists, psychologists, behaviorists and sociologists were called in to analyze how sharing a bed affects “sleep quality, overall well-being and the quality of the relationship in question.” While writing their study, they interspersed cultural and historical anecdotes about sleeping practices within the presentation of the hard research data.
Not Just a Matter of Sleep