Can’t Sleep While Sharing A Bed?

by John Meils

I kept it to myself at first—all of it. After the fuss I’d made, I didn’t have the courage to tell Zoe it’d been me all along. It was partly why, a few weeks later, I found myself agreeing to move in with her. After all, she said, we didn’t have “that sleep thing” to worry about anymore. “Right,” I croaked, despairing silently.

My ruse ended when Zoe caught the flu this past winter and it kept her up a few nights in a row. “I’m not the only one who snores,” she announced, before padding off to the bathroom. Later, when I asked her to describe the sound I made, she grunted like a pig nosing its way to a trough. “I think you have Restless Leg Syndrome, too,” she added, pulling the pin on the comment and tossing it at my feet before closing the bathroom door.

I came clean. I couldn’t sleep. It was worse than ever, likely exacerbated by my growing mania. Zoe was nonplussed, almost amused as I promised to address the problem and then peppered her with my findings.

The most surprising—and hopeful—was a new focus on couples in sleep research. According to the National Sleep Foundation, 23% of which admit to sleeping in separate beds and 20% of all couples claim they have less sex and/or have lost interest in sex because they were too sleepy.

The tension between Zoe and me was also common. “The resentments build up, then you explode,” explained Dr. Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D., director of the Rush University Sleep Center in Chicago, who further noted a high divorce rate among people with sleep problems.