ESSAYS
The Two-Bed EpidemicCHICAGO 21 August 2008 |
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Maybe this has happened to somebody you know.
They’ve been married for awhile now. For years, they seemed like a fun, compatible, sexy couple. Once upon a time, when you were all young, in your 20s, and probably not married yet, they used to come to parties and tell funny, slightly sordid stories about their sex lives–along with all the other 20somethings who had similar stories, some featuring regular bed/life partners, and some featuring random, one-time-appearance guest-stars. Maybe you have an old videotape of a New Year’s Eve party in which someone was taking a poll about anal sex. Everybody was young, and everybody was fucking. No one had kids yet. Of course.
Here is the thing: almost none of the married couples my husband and I know anymore sleep in the same bed. Some of them still manage to have sex, while sleeping separately, although not often–we are talking single-digit tallies per year in many cases. Some don’t bother with the sex part at all anymore. In either case, co-sleeping seems to have bitten the dust. What the hell is going on?
I am having something of an anxiety attack. The attack goes like this: Is there anyone out there who has been married for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, who still sleeps with his/her spouse at night and still has anything resembling passion as a part of the marriage? Who are my prospective role models? Because here in Chicago–and among my friends from all over the country–this is seeming an increasingly impossible formula? And what does that mean for someone who has been married for 15 years and still has the audacity to believe in . . . you know . . . for lack of a cooler way of saying it, True Love and all that destined-to-be-together, soul-mate shit?
My husband, David, and I met in June of 1990, while back-packing through Europe. We met, more precisely, in a train station in Avignon, France, at 4 in the morning. We spent our first 12 hours together comparing Toni Morrison, Milan Kundera and Margaret Atwood books we’d read, talking about Betty Blue, touring the Van Gogh garden of Arles and the Picasso museum. After our first day together, he had decided to leave the two friends he was traveling with and come with me (and my friend Alicia, who, unfortunately for her, got to bear witness to much of our early courtship, including having to feign sleep during several of our early sexual interludes–I later repaid her by introducing her to her future-husband, so my conscience is now clear.) What followed was the epitome of whirlwind romances: we traveled Europe together for a month, and then he followed me to London, where I was working, and bummed off British relatives to stay near me until it was time for him to begin graduate school. After a few months apart, I moved to rural New Hampshire where he was studying, and we lived together for 3 years before marrying, crazy-early by the standards of our generation, when most of our friends didn’t even have dates to the wedding. We spent 11 years together before starting a family, adopting our twin daughters from China in 2001. Later, in 2006, we had a (biological) son. Somewhere in the mix, we also moved my elderly and ailing parents into our building, so that we now have a household of 7 members.
Our lives now are a far cry from those early days of living in remote New Hampshire, making homemade bread and yogurt, hiking on the weekends, spending almost every waking moment alone in each other’s company. Now, I work 3 jobs and David has his own business, and our kids and my parents claim almost all of our time. We are, I admit, one of those couples who sometimes have to “schedule” sex, lest we get so caught up in our respective work that we forget we have . . . genitals? Orgasms? Needs? It’s crazy, I know. We try, and we manage, and we take periodic vacations alone together in which we can return to those lust-filled, heady days of pre-kids coupledom, in which we could get it on without having one ear on a baby monitor. Hmmm . . . I know those of you who don’t have kids yet are now thinking of just getting fixed before some squawking baby can spoil your fabulous sex life. Or you’re thinking this will never happen to you, even if you have 8 kids. But believe me, it will.
Yet somehow, despite all the exhaustion, all the road blocks, despite sex being a very different beast now than it was 10 years ago–still, when David and I fall together into bed at the end of each day, I am reminded of what we are in this for. No matter how busy we are, I am just neurotic enough (my best friend Alicia has basically told me she would have bust a blood vessel with the stress of keeping up my level of emotional intensity) to refuse to fall asleep until David and I are both in the bed together, his arms around me. This is my touchstone, no matter what else happens in life. Whenever I think of the fact that few couples actually die simultaneously, and therefore one spouse almost always outlives the other, this is the moment I think of as the most traumatic and bereft: the moment before sleep, when one of us would have to get into the bed alone, without the other’s body as comfort. I will hold onto that moment, the two of us in our bed alone together, for as long as I possibly can.
I seem, though, to be living in a minority, and frankly it is scaring me. My married-with-kids friends who have abandoned the “marriage” bed for separate sleeping arrangements are a varied lot. Husbandly snoring is to blame in more than one instance. In other cases, one member of the couple (the mother, of course) has gotten into the habit of sleeping with one or more of the kids, and the husband has fled the family bed due to overcrowding and discomfort. In still other arrangements, emotional disharmony–or in some cases even medical concerns (one of the two having to attend to medical needs in the night that would disturb the other’s sleep)–have caused husband and wife to sleep separately for an extended period. One of the few couples I know who still sleep together also co-sleep with their two kids, age 7 and 5, which I am un-p.c. enough to think barely counts. Even some of my gay couple friends no longer sleep together, succumbing to the same pitfalls as the hetero breeders as they, too, swap nighttime duty with their kids, the one who is “off” sleeping elsewhere so as not to be bothered.
So are kids the culprit? One couple I know slept separately for 4 years while the woman breast-fed her daughter, well into preschool. (Yes, this was a topic of much heated gossip among my group of friends, which is best not rehashed here!) Admittedly, only one of the couples I know who have taken up separate bedrooms does not have kids. All the rest fell into this habit sometime after the onslaught of parenthood. Having 3 kids of my own, I can well understand the desperate urge to SLEEP, which sometimes overrides all other urges, including those for food, adult conversation, sex. Perhaps new parents get into a rut of prioritizing sleep above all else, and just never get their “groove” back? Or perhaps–and this is the scary part–after a certain point, sexual passion just tends to fizzle in a relationship, and once this occurs, co-sleeping loses its importance somehow.
I have a friend–a writer I won’t name here–who was something of a Casanova back in the 90s, before marrying an intense young woman who shared his passion for deconstructing the news media at 6 a.m. and watching plodding documentaries on all things Marxist as weekend entertainment. He once told me that he hated to sleep alone–that he probably, given his difficulties with monogamy, would not choose to be in long-term relationships at all but for the fact that coupledom gave him a reliable warm body with whom to share his bed. This was, perhaps, one of the most sensible things I have ever heard said. While I have not had nearly the difficulty with monogamy that this man did, I can certainly understand the impetus to pair off being at least partially motivated by a desire to share sleep. Sleep is, for many (or at least many insomniacs, like myself), a kind of mini-death, and better not experienced alone.
The Death of Sex in marriage, especially post-kids, is one matter entirely, and something worth exploring on its own. I know that when I first entered into serious relationships in my early 20s, I was pretty much convinced that the whole idea behind relationships was so that I could have access to sex every day for the rest of my life. Now, with my aforementioned 3 jobs and 3 kids, I am still sort of stunned to find that this daily sex regimen is no longer as attractive to me as it once was. And yet, I have had women friends tell me in utter seriousness, after having had babies, that they could easily go a year or more without sex and they would be perfectly happy not to be bothered. I have to admit that at this point, I am still more horrified by the year-without-sex fantasy regimen than the daily-sex fantasy regimen . . . though glad, in truth, that my reality does not have to follow either.
But co-sleeping. Hmm. Perhaps if I no longer wanted to fuck my husband, I would no longer want to sleep next to his body either? I can’t say. All I know is that when two people stop sleeping together, in the literal sense of that word, it seems to me a gulf arises that stands against all the best benefits of coupleship: that port in a storm, that warm body at the end of a cold day. One by one, I have watched fellow couples fall to the sway of separate beds, and I feel alarmed almost as I would by a slew of divorces in one small, tight-knit circle of friends. Is it contagious? Is it inevitable? My parents slept separately throughout my youth. I believed they were deviant from the norm–I was, even, ashamed of their obviously flawed marriage–but perhaps I just wasn’t privy to what was going on behind everyone else’s closed doors.
Is this a modern crisis, brought on by indulgent parents sleeping with their “tweens” far past the age at which such things expected in previous eras–or have I been deluding myself in thinking that marriage is synonymous with a shared bed? Has the world really been more reflective of a 1950s TV sitcom all along, with twin beds and matching little bedside table lamps, switched off chastely at the end of the scene? Are my friends alone in suffering from some kind of selective, isolationist insanity?
I can’t answer these questions right now. My husband’s going up to bed, and I’d better get it while the getting’s good . . .
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