Why is he so inconsiderate about sleep...

[TheKrackenAwakes]

Specifically my sleep.

I’ve been on hols since Thursday. Context is an exceptionally long term, a draining ongoing non-infectious illness that has caused me to be ill with secondary things for five weeks out of the last seven.

I am so tired that I actually find it hard to get to sleep. If I am disturbed much in the morning I am very unlikely to get back to sleep.

My DH has always been a rude bastard when it comes to waking me up in ways that are so careless they ‘feel’ as if they must be deliberate.
In his mind I am excessively grumpy about it and when I am short with him about it, it apparently puts him in a very bad mood going to work...

On Friday he woke me up at 7:30 by;
Loudly yawning and stretching in bed next to me three times.
Pulling out his sock drawer so it made a bang.
Leaving the bedroom door open then humming a song while brushing his teeth and flushing the loo.
Going to the kitchen which is below the bedroom and humming loudly, boiling the kettle and putting away pans, plates and cutlery, letting each door and drawer slam...
He then brings me a cup of tea (which I have never asked for) and wants to tell me that the cat was very cute sleeping on the kitchen table.

He could plainly see I was livid. I then asked him to let me be asleep. So off he went to work.

This morning was not much better.

Am I being excessively moody? Can people just not really help being like that? Should I just put up with it forever?

And your with him because?

The humming and kitchen stuff seems on purpose as though he can't bear silence.
But that's his problem.

Have you spoken to him at a time when it is not happening and stressed how much it would mean to you to get a silent lie in?

So basically he wants you to wake up when he does for company?

You're not being moody, he's being selfish. I think I'd be turning the tables on him the next time he wants a lie in

He hates you. He wants to damage you. He may not give you a black eye but the same intent is there. Do you understand this ?

I just don’t get it.
It is more like he is incapable of putting himself in my shoes. He sleeps like the dead usually so not much would disturb him anyway.

For 200 days of the year I leave the house an hour before he even has to get up.

I creep out of the bedroom and creep around the house because I think that is just a normal part of living with other humans.
I would never dream of doing any tasks that involved making noise that might disturb the other person.

He struggles to get to sleep on a Sunday night himself so last night I told him to watch TV in bed in the hopes he would doze off easily. It worked so I then tiptoed around because to me that is just kind and what I would want him to do for me (not because he expects it or would be annoyed etc)

Is it that he isn’t awake to see me modelling how you behave when your partner is sleeping?
Is it that he can’t imag being woken up by those things because he never is?

Read my post again.

@anyfucker 😂

OP, my toddler has never slept well. In 2.5 years, so I get that sleep is precious. Just tell your DH to shut up, nicely, when you’re not trying to sleep.

I think those who sleep soundly never relate to those who are light sleepers. 7:30am also feels "late" to early risers.

Only you can judge if it's deliberate but it seems inconsiderate but I also know that some people just can't relate to not-sleeping. To be fair until I reached my 30s I slept so well so only now do I know what it is like.

These things always come down to the same issue. He does it because he thinks his feelings/comfort/happiness matters and yours does not.

Sit down and talk to him in a non confrontational way about exactly what it is that is disturbing you.

Explain it all in a matter of fact way, like you have here. Tell him you KNOW he's wouldn't do this deliberately as that would be cruel and abusive. Ask him to please be more quiet in future as you need your sleep.

If he keeps doing it, I'd tell him you'll have to have separate bedrooms and/or you're questioning your future. This is the kind of stuff that causes resentment and eats away at a relationship.

My DP is exactly the same and it drives me crazy! Just this morning we had a row about it and he thinks I'm the moody one!

He wakes early and rather than quietly getting up and sitting in the living room or something he'll fidget in bed on his phone for agesss until I'm too awake to go back off to sleep. He genuinely doesn't think he's being inconsiderate

My husband and son while normally extremely caring individuals can fall asleep sitting up so don’t really get the whole if you wake me up I won’t get back to sleep scénario. I started booking a hotel room to catch up on sleep and now hubby is more sensitive about it...

'Modelling behaviour' is for children, who don't know any better. NOT for grown adults. AnyFucker is right.

People who sleep well can't understand the stress that comes with being desperate to sleep well. My OH also struggles to appreciate the impact my chronic poor sleep is having on me.

The irony is that if he has 1 or 2 bad night sleep, he will be much worse than me, but then he goes back to sleeping well and back to flbeing full of beans. I tried to explain that how I feel is how he feels after a few bad nights but with it going on for weeks on weeks but he doesn't get it. He thinks I can't be sleeping as badly as I claim as I still get on with life and doesn't get that I do because I have no choice but that even the most mundane activities demand a lot of effort because of it.

To be fair though and the reason why I do t get angry is because I also struggled to understand when my mum complained of insomnia when I myself used to sleep like a baby.

When I was pregnant I suffered with extreme exhaustion and headaches. Husband would wake me up.
He was an abusive cockwomble and I’m now divorced.

This is deliberate and it’s a form of covert abuse. Not ok. You’re not being unreasonable. Is he difficult in other ways too?

I call my DH a baby elephant because he can't walk around or go down the stairs without stomping.

But he leaves for work stupidly early every morning without waking us up - except for the final door slam sometimes.

On the surface what he is doing is fine. Waking up, getting dressed, cleaning up dishes, making you tea. BUT if he knows you are exhausted and need to sleep he needs to be quiet. If you have clearly had this discussion and he persists then he is being awful.

Why bring a cup of tea to someone who is asleep??

Can he sleep in another room?

No one is so stupid as to not understand this.
My brother does/did this kind of crap as well as clanging about showering and cooking at 4am on random weekdays and he is a rude, selfish tit who only cares about his own needs being met.

Sound familiar?
In a nut shell: He doesn’t care about you or your feelings, and he would rather you were hugely inconvenienced than to incur a small inconvenience on his side.
It sounds like a small thing but I don’t think it is - it’s a symptom or something bigger.

For 200 days of the year keep waking him up until he gets the message.

So fucking rude. I’d have snapped after the yawning and stretching.

He’s doing it deliberately, I couldn’t live with someone with that little respect for me.

"Lundy Bancroft, acclaimed speaker and consultant on domestic violence, addresses sleep deprivation in his book Why Does He Do That?, calling it “a serious form of physical abuse, though it is not often recognized.” The effects are cumulative, he says—the longer you’re denied sleep, the greater the impact it can have on your life, listing depression, hopelessness and even a sense one is losing their mind as possible consequences."
www.domesticshelters.org/domestic-violence-articles-information/sleep-deprivation-as-abuse

Separate bedrooms. And think about whether he is selfish, inconsiderate and damaging your wellbeing in other ways.

DH was like this. He sleeps like the dead, and a lot, so I think he assumed everyone else could sleep through the apocalypse too. Until we lived together I don't think he'd ever been in a situation where he was awake while someone else was sleeping on a regular basis.

Whereas I grew up in a house with a shift worker where we had to silent so they could sleep, so I'm like an actual ninja.

I took a while but I think he gets it now that if I need a lie-in he needs to go away once he's awake and be quiet. I also had to train him to roll over in the night without using the bed as a trampoline.

Agree that he is doing it on purpose. Just reading it made me want to dump the cup of tea on his head (after it cooled)

Get some good ear plugs and sleep in another room for awhile.

This passive aggressive type will just keep doing these annoying little nasty things until you explode at them and then suddenly you're the bad guy.

He'd be wearing the cup of tea if that was me. Complete prick.

I think he understands quite well what he's doing and he enjoys it.