Could Your Marriage Survive Separate Bedrooms?

With more couples opting to sleep separately, Clare O’Reilly reveals how a sleep divorce changed her relationship forever

- Clare O'reilly

I want a divorce…’ Not the words I ever expected to pass my lips when my husband Jon, 48, and I took our vows 15 years ago. Before he dropped his morning cuppa, I corrected myself, ‘a sleep divorce’. Well, at least for a week.

Google the term and you’ll get around 100 million results. In recent years, the number of couples choosing to sleep separately has been soaring, and now one in six couples sleep apart permanently, with a quarter sleeping in different beds sometimes.*

Don’t get me wrong, my husband is the best. Seriously, he’s sensitive, kind, generous, handsome, thoughtful, funny, smart, I could go on, but you get the gist. He’s also the best father to our three children, Eddie, 17, Sammy, 12 and Annie, 10, but Jesus, Mary, and the wee donkey, when he gets between the sheets, he goes from the man I love to a pneumatic, asthmatic elephant with a perennially blocked nose. Imagine a double-decker on a hill riding the clutch for eight hours a night and you’re getting close to the seismic, window-rattling din that erupts from his nasal cavities and sinuses while he sleeps.

‘I TELL HIM HE’LL SLEEP BETTER’

Despite me having a range of sleep tactics I use to quell the cacophony, (ranging from a gentle stroke on the arm to a full on elbow in the ribs, intensity-dependent) nothing helps – and, until now, in my sleep-addled state, it had never occurred to me to venture into another room for my much-needed shut-eye.

With new research suggesting a sleep divorce could equal a happy marriage, though, I announce my plans to a bleary-eyed Jon on Sunday morning. Putting my best spin on it, I tell him he’ll sleep better without feeling like he has to protect his ribs while he slumbers and I’ll wake more rested, ergo happier.