For the past week I’ve been sleeping in the guest room where I can cough and hack with impunity. Bronchitis. Normally, my husband and I share a king-sized, Sleep Number bed topped by memory foam. It’s a spaceship of a bed, one of our biggest investments, and we love every penny of it. But the guest bed, a queen and just the right size for me to stretch out in is also quite comfy. Even so, after several days, I began to long for my own bed, and I kind of missed my husband, too.
Or did I?
He sleeps with a c-pap machine, but when his mouth is open he snores. I reach over, lightly brush his face, he closes his mouth, and I go back to sleep. Sleeping in the guest room this past week I was relieved of that chore. The room is quiet and dark with no neighbor’s bright Christmas lights seeping through the blinds. Plus, I didn’t have the sound machine on and instead used my recording of ocean waves.
I decided to try sleeping in our bed again
As the days have passed, I’ve been coughing less, so, last night I decided to try sleeping in our bed again. Only I could not fall asleep. I lay there for about an hour. Heard my husband come to bed. The eye mask didn’t block the light completely as it did in the gust room. I woke several times, once to pee, which is normal, once to brush my husband’s face to get him to stop snoring. No. Twice. And a couple of times to repress a coughing fit.
I reported all this to my husband this morning as he fed the dogs, and I made coffee. We hugged, as per usual, and he agreed that he had trouble, too, falling asleep with me back in the bed. “Yes, I heard you cough a couple of times, but it didn’t bother me. I went right back to sleep.” But his sleep was broken.
I like our platonic/romantic relationship the way it is.
Or do I?
However, neither of us wants to get too used to sleeping in separate beds. We both realize the dangers of drifting apart. I already feel it. We rarely have sex anymore. I just don’t have the energy for it, or the interest. I like our platonic/romantic relationship the way it is.
Or do I?
I had an erotic dream this morning. Maybe I do want sex with my husband, just so we maintain a certain level of intimacy. But is sex necessary? I know some therapists would say, yes, unequivocally, and others would say, no, not necessarily.
But what concerns me more than whether or not we have sex is the fact that this physical isolation feels comfortable. Am I playing with fire, so to speak? Will my husband and I drift apart if we don’t make it a point to be physically intimate with one another let alone sleep in the same bed?
I have a solution to this drift
We do other things that are intimate—like have long conversations at the dinner table, but our sit-down dinners have become less frequent as more often I prepare meals he doesn’t care for, so he fixes himself a frozen pizza or burger and salad while I eat my tofu stir-fry, often at different times.
I have a solution to this drift, I’m just not sure I want to implement it, i.e., take time for physical intimacy, or have a heart-to-heart talk about what I’m feeling about me these days and him as I lose weight, and he gains it.
But is that really the problem? No, I don’t think so. We’ve been married forty-one years. In that time we have each continued to grow and make room for each other’s flaws and changes. Now is not the time to regard those flaws in myself or in him as being intolerable. I love my husband. I want to be friends with him. And we are. I want to keep it that way, and so I need to get off this flaws bandwagon I’ve been silently on lately and celebrate what I like and love about him—the way he sits in his room working through his frustration learning to play the guitar, the way he loves football and has taught me to do the same and loves teaching me about different aspects of the game, the way he washes dishes after dinner, the way he sings his heart out while we work on a jigsaw puzzle, the way we hardly ever run out of things to talk about, unless we just don’t feel like talking, which is okay, too.
We have each continued to grow and make room for each other’s flaws and changes.
I love this man who has been my friend since we first met when I was eighteen and he was seventeen. And then we became lovers several years later, and then spouses. I don’t want to take our love for granted. So, tonight, if I’m not coughing a lot, maybe just a little, I will crawl into our bed and give it another go–get used to him again, even though he was getting used to my not being there and disturbing him in the ways that I do.
We have both agreed that sleeping in the same bed is important. Not sleeping together will make not having that talk easier and seem less important. I don’t want that. I want to maintain and even deepen the intimacy we share. Besides, it’s nice sleeping next to my best friend. It’s something I want to want.