AIBU to ask about your sleeping arrangements with your DP

[Hydrangeblueeyes]

About 3 years ago my husband started sleeping in the spare room due to his incessant snoring. Not only did it wake me up in the night, it stopped me from getting to sleep. I couldn't use ear plugs because I had to be on call overnight sometimes for my work and also my Mum was getting frail and she may have needed to contact me at night. He is also a light sleeper, and would often wake me up when he was getting up in the night to go downstairs if he couldn't sleep ( he would inevitably drop his phone on the bedroom floor when doing that , which meant I was seething with fury and couldn't get back to sleep!!) Any way..... three years later I have retired from work, my mum died and my husband lost weight and doesn't seem to snore. But, I don't want to ever share a bed with anyone ever again. My husband also seems happy with the arrangement. I love my own space, to read as long as I like, paint my nails at bedtime, have the room / bed as warm/cool as I like, listen to podcasts. So why do I feel that it is an admission of failure? That married couples should somehow sleep together, like my parents and grandparents did? I shouldn't care what people think, but I never tell friends/family that we don't sleep in the same bed if the subject ever comes up. It kind of feels like separate beds equals emotional distance too. We get on fine, we been together 30 years with the usual ups and downs. Does anyone else have this arrangement? If so do you feel a bit uneasy about it? Or are we just conditioned to sleep in the same bed as our partners?

I as said above (missed your post), we sleep separately. We adore each other and are very sexually playful at all sorts of times. Our living arrangements definitely don’t resemble a house share.

@Hydrangeblueeyes We are the same. 30 years together, love him to bits but he snores so loudly! And I have sleep apnoea and a Cpap machine. I like to be in my bed covered in huge fluffy throws and extra pillows before 9pm. I read in silence. He likes to watch Youtube videos on fixing chainsaws on his tablet.

We have separate rooms with a KS bed each and it's glorious. I occasionally feel like I'm doing something wrong - but we've just returned from a 10 day holiday where we shared a bed and it was such a relief to get home and be able to actually sleep properly.

I won't ever routinely share a bed or a room again!

'He likes to watch Youtube videos on fixing chainsaws on his tablet'

Ah yes. Watching chainsaw clips on his tablet

DH snores and I have sleep apnoea, so we sleep separately. It’s actually very common, and much more so than you’d think. Plus aristocrats have always slept apart (and the upper middle classes often, too) - in many stately homes you can see suites of rooms where the double room/four poster was the woman’s room, and the man slept in a separate “gentleman’s suite” or valet room. Very common in the 1920s and 1930s for large houses for the wealthy to explicitly be designed like this. Further back, wealthy couples almost always had entirely separate rooms. It was poor people, as a pp says, who had to sleep many (often not just two!) to a bed.

If you talk about this to friends, quite a few will end up telling you they sleep apart. I’m always quite upfront about it. Snoring is a major issue for lots of people, but also just different nighttime preferences/sleep schedules, too. DH gets up much earlier than me for work; and I hate being rolled on by a man in the night and having the duvet pulled off me (why can’t men turn over under the duvet? Why do they always take it with them…?)

Same here 😊