Why I Stopped Sleeping With The Love Of My Life

If you want to get way better rest, kick your partner out of bed

- Jeff Vrabel

I like my wife very much, and I operate under the assumption that she likes me, but our past few months have been made immeasurably better by the manner in which, come nightfall, she and I have nothing to do with each other. At bedtime she retreats to our home’s master bedroom, a cozy sky-blue sanctuary replete with scented candles and a queen bed, while I take my nightcap and shuffle off to the former guest bedroom, now my own quarters, an island-green space that contains a second queen bed and even more scented candles, because as an adult married man I am deadly serious about my calming aromas.

We haven’t always slept apart. For years I would lie awake beside my wife and seethe at her perpetual pillow-shuffling, the icy light of her Words with Friends game, and, most significantly, her alarm clock, which announced itself every morning at 5.45am and was followed by her hammering the snooze button with such vigour that I began to suspect it wasn’t a snooze button at all but a switch that summoned waffles and back rubs from some other, better husband. She, meanwhile, suffered through a partner — i.e. me — who apparently snores like an elephant giving birth inside a dumpster.