My husband is my best friend. He is my lover. He is my No. 1-compartment. He is a great supplier and problem solver and a fantastic partner that I never want to leave. And I can see these things much clearer now that we are not sleeping in the same bed.
I am not the first person who ”Sleeping fair“My partner and several Studies and Personal accounts have proven that more and more dedicated couples choose to sleep in different beds, with almost 18 percent who choose to sleep separately every night, according to one 2025 survey Performed by Sleep-Health Company Resmed. But when I tell you that this decision has changed my marriage for the better – and possibly saved it – please understand how multilevel that explanation is.
My husband and I were in a generally challenging stage of marriage when we decided to call it sleep. We were married for several years, both with full -time jobs, and had a son and a Preteen daughter. My husband is a natural hustler and had come to me to take more “ownership” of great responsibility such as swimming lessons and preschool management. I am a naturally stylish freak, and I had been given him to take more ownership of less responsibility, such as throwing away debris. So when he woke me up in the middle of the night to put on “snapshots”-as I bought out of my pocket after I did not qualify for insurance cover for a night watchman to prevent snoring-I would snap back, raging that he asked me to do another thing. How dare he ask me to put on snort teeth at 2 o’clock when he, also a nicer, couldn’t even put his used tissues in the garbage?
I always woke up and felt like a monster after that kind of often, small sections. I even raised my medication in an attempt to stop my rage and anxiety around my husband. But with the mounting of marital resentment that is based on lack of sleep, the only real recipe was to. . . sleep.
Our sleeping fair began Surreptitious. One of us would “fall asleep” on the sofa, without knowing that it was a conscious choice based on all these snaps. Then at night when his daughter, my stepdaughter, was with his mother’s house, my husband “would accidentally” fall asleep after a long night with work in his room, which acts as his WFH office.
Eventually, these unintentional sleep habits became the norm. We tipped around the question with each other, and enjoyed that it felt “bad” every now and then. But then we started sending each other stories about Celebrities normalize this experienceAnd eventually the shame of breaking from dominant married paradigms began to fade-especially when we realized how many specific aspects of our marriage favored to sleep in separate bedrooms.
So for all the others, the couples are fighting out there, here is my case to get a sleeping fair.
We take out alone time for guilty pleasures
At the end of a long day, I’m usually desperate after lonely time. It’s not that I can’t unwind in the company of my husband or others-it’s that I prefer loneliness, so I can watch reality TV, eat leftovers and melt my phone in an assessment-free space.
Most of these activities are extremely fun to do in bed, and for me is soothing. Their natural ending is a whole night’s sleep. Knowing that I can fall asleep to the comfort of my own guilty TV programs while my husband watches his sport has everything except eradicated the end of the night control that we used to experience, and now our pre-bed sofft time results in the expansion of cultural horizons (sometimes I look even to him!).
We can show up for each other in different ways
When we drove empty all the time, my husband and I would replace the grocery store and mix-child-round-slog. Now these types of everyday tasks feel like fun times with my bestie. When I get a text from him that says: “Want me to get you from your spinning class and we can take (our son) to Trader Joe together?”, I get Fanny Flutters.
Our sex life has actually improved
When Covid first hit 2020 and everyone in the world 9 to 5 was sent home to work, it was a strange, scary and confusing time. In addition to a pandemic that took over, I also worked on a large entertainment brand at that time and helped with the launch of a new streaming service. To alleviate the stress of figuring this out from my bedroom, I felt grateful that I could ride into the room where my husband worked and just hug him. . . And sometimes more. (Before you judge, just think about this as a lunch break with dessert. And sad to my old boss, if he reads this.)
It was when I was told that I actually prefer intimacy outside hours. Night sex seems boring now, if I am honest and predictable – dinner sex is more a revitalizant for me because of the spontaneity of it. I’m glad we don’t have the pressure that standard for night sex just because we sleep in the same bed.
We have more meaningful date nights
Since there is so much intimacy and connection associated with sharing a bed with a partner, my husband and I can much of it for scheduled date nights at restaurants, exhibitions and movies. I will admit that I have some reinforcement to do at the end here; I am not the world’s best event planner, because I pour a lot of my energy into my career and self-care/health efforts. But now I know how really important this skill is, and I have a renewed sense of commitment to exercise it.
We have calculated more fair childcare, especially in the mornings
My husband and I have a scheduled rotation for clothes, brushing, feeding and packaging of our children in the morning before school or camp. When I used to be up all night because my husband snore or vice versa, but standing up with the children felt like violent punishment. Waking him up to take my place on my scheduled morning because I was too exhausted resulted in fights, stressful mornings and sometimes destroyed days, for both of us. Since our sleeping fair, I have not even violated the morning rule once.
We try to balance chores, housework and life administrator
. . . Ok, ok, we haven’t quite thought this yet. There is still some imbalance at both our ends. But – we want to. We want to figure this out so badly. I want to get better at the life he wants, and he wants to get better at the life I want. And believing in this commitment is a step forward where we were, which was a place for annoyance to handle diaper orders and the laundry and preschool applications and dates and keep the damn kitchen counter clear. Now that we are not sleeping in the same bed at night, I know, however, that I will be a better school mom, and I know he will be better at putting his ripped envelopes in the recycling compartment.
In summary: Partners must prioritize sleep, in every way that works for them, and we should all be destroyed all the associated shame. Take it from my husband and me, a couple of symphonic nicer.
Joanna Brenner Supports curation and production of newsletters on PS, which ensures that readers get involved in PS stories over health, fitness and overall lifestyle in ways that make them feel seen, but not judged. She has monitored and handled editorial strategies at Peacock, Vanity Fair, Propublica and Pew Research Center and works with digital publishers to strengthen voice and credibility on all platforms (especially newsletters, the love letter from the 2000s).