Sleeping Apart
It’s worth considering, isn’t it?
In a 2019 article on Medium by Angela Lashbrook (It’s Time to Embrace the Sleep Divorce), she suggested couples consider sleeping apart, citing several sources who claim an increasing number of couples are doing so with greater frequency, getting a better night’s sleep, and they have improved dispositions and health. I found the trend surprising, but not the result.
A Google search shows 16th- and 17th-century couples had private bed chambers, but Victorian puritanical ideals and fear of disease gave rise to the idea of communal sleeping as unhealthy and immoral, and twin beds became the norm into the 1960s. In 1956, however, birth-control advocate and eugenicist, Marie Stopes, labeled twin beds the “invention of the devil,” “symptomatic of the evils of modernity and endangering the happiness of the modern married couple.”
In 1947, in the early days of television, the first network program to show a couple in the same bed was Mary Kay and Johnny, a real-life married couple. But in 1951, when Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz of I Love Lucy fame were shown in what appeared to be a king-size bed, it was apparent when they crawled under the sheets that twin beds were pushed together, each bed made separately. It was then considered scandalous to show them in the same bed.
