Right before my husband of 21 years blindsided me with a divorce, he said, “I think sleeping in separate beds is what did us in.” I was taken aback.
We’d started sleeping apart when our daughter, then four, was being treated for stage IV neuroblastoma. Someone had to manage the overnight medications, hydration bags, feeding tubes. My husband could function on very little sleep; I could not. Sleep deprivation gave me migraines and made me cry over expired cottage cheese. He volunteered for the guest room without hesitation—and it stuck, for about a decade.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.
“I did. You don’t listen,” he said, his voice trembling not with nerves but with anger. “You made it perfectly clear you had no interest in sex.”
“That’s not true,” I said, scrambling. The reality was that we hadn’t been intimate for three years. I considered leading him to our bedroom right then and there, as a last-ditch reminder that we’d had (we had) good sex, but I couldn’t be sure I had what it took to pull off the kind that would make him stay.
After he left, I wondered why he hadn’t given me an ultimatum. Why didn’t he let me be part of the decision? My best guess is that he thought I wouldn’t react well—and he was probably right.
When we first got married, my husband and I went to bed at the same time. But after we became parents, I started turning in early. When he would crawl into bed after midnight, waking me up, I’d lie there cataloguing to-dos while he snored and apologized and snored again. He woke up chipper. I woke up whatever the opposite of chipper is.
My husband made the guest bedroom his own during our daughter’s illness, adding a desk and two framed photographs of our girls. At the same time, sleeping alone made me softer. I didn’t snap at my older daughter over her messy backpack. I drove to the hospital without fearing I’d fall asleep on the highway. Eventually, I wrote an article about how sleeping in separate bedrooms had improved my marriage. I emphasized that communication and time together were the keys to pulling it off successfully.
Until then, only my close friends knew my husband and I slept apart; the stigma then surrounding it kept me quiet. But after the article went to print, more people than I could believe told me they slept apart from their partner, too. The consensus was the same: better sleep, less resentment, a new normal. The arrangement is known, somewhat ironically, as “sleep divorce.”
But when our younger daughter finished treatment, my husband asked, his blue eyes doing that thing: “When am I coming back to the big bed?”
I held him off. “Soooooon,” I cooed. At the same time, an internal voice screamed never.
I loved my new rituals too much: flinging open the shades at 5 a.m., Call the Midwife without negotiation. But to have those things and to honor my need for sleep were in direct conflict with his need for connection. To him, a warm body beside his—that unspoken union—was proof of partnership. We never argued about it. I wish we had.
In the last years of our marriage, I felt profoundly alone. I’m sure he did too. I was laser-focused on getting our girls through high school, managing my daughter’s chronic care, teaching, writing. He was opening a restaurant, rarely home.
On a walk about a year before he left, I told him I needed to be touched more. It felt absurd after 20 years together.
“Me too,” he said. “I need that too.”
But nothing changed. The delicate, silent back-and-forth between us—each one hoping the other would initiate—had long stopped being a dance; now it was just distance. I told my best friend it had been months since we’d had sex. “Do you think he’s getting it someplace else?” I asked her. “He’s gotta be,” she said.
Later, during the pandemic, he asked me to kiss him before a bike ride. I wanted to, but I was terrified he might have picked up the virus at the restaurant. In hindsight, I wonder if it was a test I failed without knowing I was being graded.
Was I being selfish? I was trying to survive, just as he was, and I believed sleep helped me do it. But physical intimacy—even simple closeness—had played a larger role in our survival as a couple than I’d acknowledged. Maybe we could have started with weekends in the same bed. Maybe I could have booked a king instead of two queens when we traveled. Maybe I could have simply asked: What do you need from me?
In the end, I suppose I got what I thought I wanted: a bed to myself every night. Whether I got what I needed is still being determined.