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"  The other night, my girlfriend passed out on me. Full-blown, deep sleep, couldn&amp;amp;#146;t wake her up if I tried. She was talking with me animatedly one minute, and snoozing the next. When she finally came to, she groggily asked for some jewelry she had left behind previously. &amp;amp;#147;Actually, can I just have everything I&amp;amp;#146;ve ever left here?&amp;amp;#148; she mumbled. &amp;amp;#147;Everything?&amp;amp;#148; I asked, since she usually keeps a change of clothes at my house just in case. &amp;amp;#147;Everything,&amp;amp;#148; she mumbled. She gathered everything up, and left without a word to me. I thought it was a prank. The next day, she didn&amp;#039;t know why she&amp;#039;d done any of this, and she barely remembered her drive home. She&amp;#039;d been really tired, she said. You&amp;amp;#146;d think this would freak me out, but I&amp;#039;m used to it. An ex-girlfriend used to ask me to come over and hang out, but by the time I&amp;amp;#146;d made the 20 minute drive, she&amp;amp;#146;d be asleep. Completely out. I&amp;amp;#146;d text, call, ring the doorbell, and nothing. It was like Sleeping Beauty, except that instead of eternal slumber, the curse was that I spent 20 minutes on the phone outside in the cold instead of playing video games at home. This happened all the time. Once a month at least. One time, when I actually managed my way inside, I tried to wake her up by telling her there was a fire. She rolled over with the focused indifference of the slumbersome, mumbled, &amp;amp;#147;What? A fire?&amp;amp;#148; and fell back asleep. I have seen women fall asleep in the middle of sentences and need &amp;amp;#151; NEED &amp;amp;#151; to take power naps. I&amp;amp;#146;ve seen them fall asleep while playing video games. I fall asleep on the couch sometimes, but I&amp;amp;#146;ve never done it in the middle of an activity. Because of all that, I just always assumed women are sleepier than men. So I pitched an investigation in a staff meeting. &amp;amp;#147;You know how women are always more tired?&amp;amp;#148; I tried. I was promptly ridiculed. &amp;amp;#147;That&amp;amp;#146;s not a thing,&amp;amp;#148; every woman in the room told me, in unison. As they laughed at my stories of girlfriends drunk with sleepiness, I started to question my sanity. Why the hell was my perspective so skewed? Am I specifically attracted to women who suffer from somnambulism and narcolepsy? Am I just so boring that I can put people into a trance-like sleep with the drone of my voice? I remember the first couple times it happened. At first I was annoyed, but I was young enough that I came to accept it. Your girlfriend comes over and falls asleep and you just watch TV and try not to wake her up. That&amp;#039;s how dating works. My mother &amp;amp;#151; and her mother before her &amp;amp;#151; found true love by napping peacefully on her boyfriend&amp;#039;s couch, and a few years later I was born. Yes? Over the years, my thesis was backed up by heavy female eyelid after heavy female eyelid. I saw my friend&amp;amp;#146;s girlfriend fall asleep while eating fried chicken, food on the way to her mouth. How could sleep overpower chicken? And my male friends aren&amp;#039;t passing out on my couch. One time, a woman I didn&amp;amp;#146;t know asked if she could take a nap in my roommate&amp;amp;#146;s bed during a party because she was tired. (Of note: She was not drunk.) Guys would never do that. Needing someone to corroborate my lifetime of tired women, I called Dr. Nancy Simpkins, a board certified internist specializing in women&amp;#039;s health. Was there actually anything to my theory of women being more affected by fatigue? &amp;amp;#147;Recent studies showed that lack of sleep affects men worse than women,&amp;quot; she told me. Oh. So my relationships are not only not normal, they&amp;#039;re the opposite of normal. Grasping, I pushed Dr. Simpkins for details. The study, she said, also showed that women with low amounts of vitamin B6 and iron were more affected by fatigue than men with those deficiencies, so there&amp;amp;#146;s something. It&amp;amp;#146;s a stretch, but it&amp;amp;#146;s something. &amp;amp;#147;Younger women handle things differently,&amp;quot; she continued. &amp;quot;With alcohol, they&amp;amp;#146;ll feel washed out. A female metabolism won&amp;amp;#146;t process it the way men do.&amp;amp;#148; I don&amp;#039;t think any of my girlfriends have been heavy drinkers, but it is possible that nights of serious drinking can make women sleepier than men in the days following. Science wasn&amp;#039;t exactly disproving my theory. So I&amp;amp;#146;m faced with a few possibilities: I&amp;amp;#146;m a vortex of boringness, the women I&amp;amp;#146;m dating aren&amp;amp;#146;t eating enough fish, and/or they&amp;amp;#146;re all closet alcoholics. I&amp;amp;#146;d like to think that I&amp;amp;#146;m not so dull that my mere presence sends people careening wildly into a fatigue so severe they can&amp;#039;t resist the urge to sleep. Or that I&amp;amp;#146;m such a terrible person people feign being dead so they don&amp;amp;#146;t have to deal with me, like you would a bear. There&amp;amp;#146;s the &amp;amp;#147;processing out alcohol&amp;amp;#148; theory, which I suppose could be true, but I don&amp;amp;#146;t think every woman I know is sneaking nips of vodka when I&amp;amp;#146;m not looking. Maybe, just maybe, all of their diets are so poor that their low iron levels are giving them the sleeping habits of newborns. Maybe there&amp;#039;s a gas leak in my town, or a curse from an evil wizard. I&amp;#039;m willing to accept pretty much any answer at this point. Anyway, now that my world has been rocked, I&amp;#039;m not really sure how to proceed. Is secretly monitoring your girlfriend&amp;#039;s sleep cycles creepy? Or spiking her drinks with iron supplements? Should I plan more dates that really get the adrenaline pumping (skydiving?). I guess sleepy women are just my type, and my burden to carry. Sometimes literally, when she falls asleep on the couch. Want more from Frank? Follow him on Twitter. Photo credit: Getty "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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