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www.quora.com/Would-you-have-a-separate-bedroom-from-your-significant-other-and-why/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper
Q. Would you have a separate bedroom from your significant other and why?
A. I do not sleep well with others.
This way I get my own room, I get All The Closet Space for my costumes, I get a work space for my hobbies where my clutter and mess doesn’t impact anyone else, and a kitchen where *nobody touches my knives except me*, and yet I can walk barefoot down the hall, or in some state of undress, to the next door over to visit with a partner or metamour, and there is enough separation between us that sounds of sex or loud music or enthusiastic video game play are not intrusive to anyone.
This whole sharing a bedroom thing is a relatively recent trend in human history. We have tried a whole slew of different sleeping arrangements, each with their pros and cons. There is no reason to believe that the house layout of one master bedroom for a romantic couple and several smaller bedrooms for children with common rooms like a kitchen and living room, is the “proper” configuration. That was a lie told to us by post WWII propaganda in the United States trying to force everyone into a nuclear family setting for a capitalistic, patriarchal society.
Family structures have varied all over the map throughout time and across cultures. This one particular configuration should not be the “default” that everyone falls into automatically, and those who don’t are considered deviations. If anything, this nuclear family model is the historical deviation, and it’s turning out to have less and less applicability as American and Western European cultures evolve into more ethical structures allowing more freedom for individual variation and preferences in people’s pursuit of happiness.
I think more heteromononormative relationships would benefit from separating sleeping quarters and developing personal spaces within shared homes the way some of us who do relationships differently have done with our own families. This doesn’t mean that people can’t be *allowed* to share sleeping space when they want to. Just that having their own space and learning to accept sleeping apart as a “normal” option for relationships (rather than a sign of a problem) helps in developing autonomy, individuality, and solves a lot of poor sleeping habits that we Westerners are kinda famous for.
Once we start sleeping better, the rest of our days tend to get more productive and we become generally happier, which will spill into the happiness and success of our romantic and familial relationships. We currently spend a lot of money on various products designed to mitigate or compensate for the problems that come along with shared sleeping space. Those are problems that could be solved entirely by simply not sleeping together (when our circumstances and finances allow for it).
Q. Would you have a separate bedroom from your significant other and why?
A. I do not sleep well with others.
- I have back problems and I need to sleep in a semi-reclined position (that means partially sitting up). It makes my pillow arrangements inconvenient for people who sleep more traditionally laying all the way flat. So I can’t really cuddle or snuggle with someone while sleeping, and if we’re not going to be touching at least part of the time, what’s the point of sharing a bed?
- I am a ridiculously light sleeper. I wake at *everything*. My sister used to sneak into my room at night to steal my clothing and my cassette tapes. My parents refused to allow me to have a lock on my bedroom door because they felt it was too “secretive” and they wanted access to my room at all times (they did not listen to me when I offered for them to have a key and they did not see any violation of privacy here).
So I became super sensitive to motion at night. I could hear the air pressure change outside of my bedroom door when someone approached. I woke every single night to my sister attempting to sneak in, once I developed this sensitivity. Every night *for years*.
So sharing a room with another person who snores, tosses and turns, mumbles, moves, or gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom is incredibly disruptive to me. No matter how many hours of sleep I get, when I share a room with other people, I sleep so poorly that I feel jet lagged all the next day.
- I have several sleep disorders - Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, Sleep Paralysis, and Night Terrors. With the DSPS, my internal sleep clock is off by about 6 hours. My body does not think it’s bedtime until around 4 in the morning and insists that it’s not time to wake until noon. Sharing a sleeping space with people who are on a different sleep schedule is disruptive to both of us, as one of us is not yet tired and still active while the other is already asleep and then reversed in the morning.
With the Sleep Paralysis and Night Terrors, these things are both triggered by regular disruption of the REM cycle, at least for me. So, things like hitting the snooze button repeatedly for several hours (yes, I’ve done this) will trigger an episode, especially if I do this for several days in a row. Also, people who are restless sleepers and move a lot will interrupt my REM cycle enough to trigger an episode. So are snorers.
- I’m also probably a synesthete. Synesthesia is a condition in which experiencing something with one sense is received as another sense. So, like, some people taste color, or they actually visually see sounds. My version is that certain sounds produce an actual physical sensation in my body that is not just the standard “air vibrations entering the ear canal” sorts of feelings, nor is it that internal thumping feeling everyone gets with really loud bass. My favorite feeling is the sound of one particular type of singing voice that produces the sensation of what I refer to as “liquid cat fur” gently rubbing down the back of my throat.
Snoring produces a painful, rage-inducing feeling in my head and chest. I absolutely cannot sleep when there is any kind of snoring at all, even the occasional one-off snores that happens to almost everybody. It will wake me instantly with pain and rage. I’ve had to learn how to sleep with earbuds in playing music at full volume just to drown out the sound of snoring because sleeping through loud music and hard things in my ears was less painful than hearing that sound.
- On top of all of these health issues, I’m polyamorous and introverted. The introversion means that I really need space that belongs just to me, where I can feel safe and go to recharge and where nobody else is allowed in without my express permission. In most house layouts, there are very few options for giving people their own space, other than bedrooms. And as I live below the poverty line, affording a home with a shared bedroom and all the normal rooms and also private space for everyone quickly starts to become very expensive. It’s easiest to make the private space also be everyone’s bedroom.
The polyamory means that I am likely to have multiple partners. If I live with more than one partner, then all my health issues are compounded because there are more than 2 people all attempting to sleep in the same room. Trust me, I’ve done this, and it did not end well for me. I was in a group once with 6 people and they all insisted on sharing a bed together. After the novelty wore off, it became a living hell for me with 3 different snore patterns, 2 “morning people” to my “night owl” pattern, no privacy for sex, and crawling in and out at the foot of the bed without disrupting anyone else to get to my space. Even giving everyone our own bed-sheets did not solve the problem of different preferences in ambient sleeping temperature either.
If any of my partners do not live with me, then when I want to have them spend the night, I either have to kick an existing partner out of his own bed (and then have sex in a bed that someone else sleeps in, which doesn’t bother everyone but does bother some), or we have to have a house big enough for a spare room that’s dedicated to guests and that goes empty the rest of the time. I don’t usually have the money for houses big enough to have rooms that are only being used occasionally.
If I live with one partner, and our house is big enough for a shared room and a guest room, we might as well just each have our own bedroom. That way nobody gets kicked out of their “own” bed when a guest comes over. Then there are no hurt feelings over used sheets, interruptions of routine, feeling “left out”, etc.
This way I get my own room, I get All The Closet Space for my costumes, I get a work space for my hobbies where my clutter and mess doesn’t impact anyone else, and a kitchen where *nobody touches my knives except me*, and yet I can walk barefoot down the hall, or in some state of undress, to the next door over to visit with a partner or metamour, and there is enough separation between us that sounds of sex or loud music or enthusiastic video game play are not intrusive to anyone.
This whole sharing a bedroom thing is a relatively recent trend in human history. We have tried a whole slew of different sleeping arrangements, each with their pros and cons. There is no reason to believe that the house layout of one master bedroom for a romantic couple and several smaller bedrooms for children with common rooms like a kitchen and living room, is the “proper” configuration. That was a lie told to us by post WWII propaganda in the United States trying to force everyone into a nuclear family setting for a capitalistic, patriarchal society.
Family structures have varied all over the map throughout time and across cultures. This one particular configuration should not be the “default” that everyone falls into automatically, and those who don’t are considered deviations. If anything, this nuclear family model is the historical deviation, and it’s turning out to have less and less applicability as American and Western European cultures evolve into more ethical structures allowing more freedom for individual variation and preferences in people’s pursuit of happiness.
I think more heteromononormative relationships would benefit from separating sleeping quarters and developing personal spaces within shared homes the way some of us who do relationships differently have done with our own families. This doesn’t mean that people can’t be *allowed* to share sleeping space when they want to. Just that having their own space and learning to accept sleeping apart as a “normal” option for relationships (rather than a sign of a problem) helps in developing autonomy, individuality, and solves a lot of poor sleeping habits that we Westerners are kinda famous for.
Once we start sleeping better, the rest of our days tend to get more productive and we become generally happier, which will spill into the happiness and success of our romantic and familial relationships. We currently spend a lot of money on various products designed to mitigate or compensate for the problems that come along with shared sleeping space. Those are problems that could be solved entirely by simply not sleeping together (when our circumstances and finances allow for it).
