The Sleep Issue

For the past 6 1/2 years, I have not slept in bed with M. This is a problem for me which has not aged well with time, and which I fear (possibly without warrant) is a chief source of whatever strife we have in our relationship.

It began shortly after the birth of A. For his first six months, she breastfed him and was up constantly throughout each night. After six months had passed, she made the decision to stop. This was for a number of reasons: her milk supply dwindled, he never really grasped how to latch properly, the constant pumping was draining her (no pun intended), and she had not slept well in months.

Because she had already done so much in regards to tearing the children, I decided one night, on a whim, that I would take the baby monitor with me and go sleep on the couch. I don’t recall the specifics of that particular night, but little did I know that it would change the trajectory of my life in such a profound way. M woke up the next morning feeling refreshed and satisfied in a way that she hadn’t in months. I took it upon myself to shoulder the responsibility of nighttime parenting duties, until A was old enough to sleep through the night.

I can’t say that this happened 100% of the time. Even having the monitor sitting next to my head as I slept on the couch was not always enough to wake me. There were still times when M heard the baby wake up first and got up with him. But, after a couple months, it had become a semi-permanent arrangement. I was not altogether happy with it, but I really thought that eventually I would find my way back to bed.

After those first few months, A had started to sleep through the night. But by this time, another concern had arisen regarding the nighttime parenting responsibilities: wandering children. M had gotten it into her head that L was likely to get up in the middle of the night and wander straight out of the house. I tried coming back to bed a couple of times, but was inevitably asked to return to my post on the couch. I did so begrudgingly. If it gave M enough peace of mind that she could get a good night’s sleep to have me be a final barrier between the boys and the great outside in the middle of the night, I would continue to do it. After all, I thought that this, too, would pass.

And my couch-sleeping continued. For the next two years, that’s where I slept. Even when we had family come and spend the night, I found myself sleeping in places other than my own bed. At some point, we got L a full-sized bed, and I would occasionally sleep in it with him (usually on nights when family came up to spend the night. Those were always restless nights, though. He was a rather violent sleeper, always thrashing about and snoring loudly (until his tonsils came out, at least). I actually welcomed returning to the couch after those nights.

Then, in January 2020, sleep life in our house became infinitely more complicated. It was then that M had surgery to remove a non-cancerous growth on her back. The surgery itself was relatively routine, and it went very well. But something happened during the surgery which almost immediately gave her insomnia. She still suspects, to this day, that it had something to do with the anesthesia that she was given. But, whatever the cause, she had become incapable of falling asleep.

She would lie in bed for hours, and sleep would not come. She tried all of the conventional means she could research to fix it. OTC drugs and supplements, guided meditations, sleep masks, earplugs, music, and a host of other things, all to no avail. The only thing left (sort of; I might get into that later), was to consult a sleep doctor.

She finally did, after a big run-around and many hoops to jump through, get in to see the only sleep doctor in our county. She went through the whole sleep study process, only to find that there was nothing physically wrong with her that the doctor could find. This was, on one hand, a sigh of relief; she did not have apnea or narcolepsy or anything else. However, they could not explain the reason for her insomnia. They ended up prescribing a pill for her, which she may very well need to take for the rest of her life.

But it doesn’t end there. The pill would be fine if it worked with 100% efficiency each and every night. But unfortunately it doesn’t. It does help her, but not to the point that she consistently is able to fall asleep after a given time. She always takes it at the same time every night, but it still takes her several hours to actually fall asleep many nights a week. She has concocted a specific regimen of various sleep aids which she has to take every night. Her doctor says that if it is working that she should just keep doing it, because it is better than the alternative of getting zero sleep each and every night.

I don’t mean to diminish the impact this has on her by complaining about how it affects me, but it does affect me greatly in many ways.

First, I have always been a very deep sleeper, and as I have aged, my snoring has gotten worse. This is most significant after I drink or we are intimate. The drinking is not so much of a problem, because it happens so infrequently. Maybe two or three times a year am I a “heavy” drinker (which means about 4-6 drinks over the course of an evening for me).

This is also something that I have have a modicum of control over. I have spent a good deal of time, energy, and money to help remedy the problem. I’ve been undergoing a long-term, self-directed sleep study and have taken a very scientific approach to snoring remedies. After much trial and error, I have found a combination of different remedies that has mostly curtailed my snoring (nasal dilators, daily Flomax sprays, a SnoreRx mouthpiece, and an elevated wedge pillow, FYI.) Now, I barely snore at all. But it still has not gotten me back into the bedroom.

The loss of intimacy is a much bigger problem for me. For the twenty-plus years that M and I have been together, one of the greatest joys in my life has been cuddling up with her post-sex. We still do that, but it is generally a very short-lived experience, now. We used to be wrapped in one another’s arms all night long, but now there comes a point when she kicks me out of bed. Sometimes, when we make love very late at night, it is almost immediately after we finish. This is very emotionally draining on me. I think that she knows this, but her lack of sleep is so detrimental to her own physical and mental wellbeing that she doesn’t have much of a choice.

The second major impact this whole situation has had on me is via my parenting of L and A. Because of the copious amount of sleeping aids M takes just to fall asleep each night, she always sleeps late. Hence, I am the primary parent for the boys for the first two-three hours of each morning. This is usually fine, but there are definitely times when I feel like I could use some extra help to either separate them or occupy them. It is especially difficult when they start doing something loud or want to do something but can’t because their mom is still sleeping.

I hate the idea of being sleep divorced. But that’s exactly the terminology to describe these past 6 years of our marriage. We are incapable of sharing the same bed anymore. This really became a permanent arrangement for us in 2021, though. The boys got bunk beds and started sharing a room, which freed up one of the bedrooms in our house. M went out of her way to buy me a twin-sized bed to put in that room, as we otherwise converted it to a playroom for the kids. And since then, there I’ve been, every night. Is it better than the couch? No, not really. It certainly isn’t as comfortable, but it does give me a place to be with a door.

There are all of these studies that I’ve read on the topic of sleep divorce over the past two years, and they are incredibly conflicting. “This is great for marriages, because everyone can be well rested!” “This is terrible for marriages, because it negatively impacts REM sleep!” Im not sure that science has come to any sort of consensus on the topic, but I know that it is something that I do not want.

As we look for new houses in our new city, she insists on bringing up the possibility of finding a four-bedroom house, so that I can have my own bedroom. I hate the idea. I just want to sleep with my wife. I’m concerned that there is more going on, that she is not telling me about (with my own sleep habits and their effects on her at nighttime.) I would do or try anything to be able to regain a sleep marriage, and end this awful limbo that I exist in every night