Understanding why many married couples sleep in single beds

It is the not so mysterious mystery of slumber, when your shackles are down and you get to be at one with little more than a duck down pillow, your own mental state and a partner who elbows you black and blue whilst breathing in your face as if an asthmatic angle grinder.

It’s a curious thing is ‘sleep.’ As the years pass, I find myself more than ever, going to bed and lying there day dreaming of being in bed the next night as if tonight’s attempt at getting some shut eye is going to be an abject failure before we even begin. As a light sleeper, it takes little to wake me, from which there is rarely any return to my vegetative state, whether that interruption be the cat meowing for a midnight snack, a boy racer smashing the granny out of a Mark 1 Escort in the street outside or the glare of my wife’s phone as she has to check the device in case the ping is ‘an emergency’ (spoiler: it never is).

Writing this column after another night of broken shut eye and arriving home from work feeling, and looking, like death warmed up, I thought it prudent to do some research and see if my patterns are normal. It seems 41 per cent of UK adults sleep in the foetal position which, if true, cannot help the battalions of us who suffer from a bad back. 15 per cent of the population are sleepwalkers including one of my daughters’ friends: Having never witnessed this, my wife was taking every precaution on her latest sleepover, ensuring all outside doors were locked and the keys hidden. This proved somewhat detrimental to my aim of going out early in the morning and she proceeded to berate me for daring to wake her to enquire as to how to leave my own property through the door.

Understandably it's not uncommon for deaf people to sign in their sleep nor for blind folk to predominantly dream in sound, touch, taste and smell. In the animal kingdom a giraffe needs only 1.9 hours a night to rest its neck whereas a bat needs 20 hours a day.

Having had the sensation of falling as I drift to sleep before suddenly sitting upright, and having been told that if you don’t stop that feeling ‘you’ll ‘die’, I’m taking no chances and can often be found sitting up quickly which freaks out the wife if she is in the room. It has something to do with ‘hypnic jerks’. Much to my chagrin, through repetition, I do not suffer from Dysania which is the difficulty in getting out of bed in the morning. Whoever undertook that research however has not had teenage children who, to a soul, seem to suffer from such an affliction.

It’s amazing really that the single task we spend most of our lives doing, sleeping, totalling around 26 years, is the one topic we rarely discuss bar the odd ‘have a good sleep?’ which is the conversation killer to end all conversations. The fascination, if that’s the correct word, is with who others sleep with, not how long or how we sleep. As the years pass that fascination wanes however and it becomes more about the self and the realisation that the pains don’t subside once you hit the sack and that the insomnia, night terrors and lack of slumber are here for life, not just for Christmas.

It's no wonder therefore that 25 per cent of married couples sleep in single beds. Having mocked such elderly activity upon meeting my wife some quarter of a century ago, now we both are open to the idea. To be the master of ones own duvet, to not have to face the chainsaw of the snore or be kicked and hit as you try and grab a few hours before work look more appealing by the minute. It beats waking up grumpy I suppose, but usually I let her sleep….