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"  When I was in college, my boyfriend and I used to alternate nights between my dorm-issue single bed and the double futon in his frat room. I can&amp;#039;t recall having any trouble sleeping in such cramped quarters, but in retrospect, I wonder if this had more to do with alcohol and the passions of youth than anything else. Because these days, I&amp;#039;ve been having a hell of a time sharing a comparatively luxurious queen-size bed with the man in my life.  Before I met my husband, Eric, I considered myself a high-performance sleeper who clocked a consistent eight hours a night. The only thing I never fully mastered was sleeping in a plane or car\u2014I require horizontality to reach somnolence. But sleeping is like playing tennis: You think you&amp;#039;re pretty decent until you actually see a ranked player up close. Compared with my husband, I&amp;#039;m the bedtime equivalent of a five-year-old who can barely get the ball over the net. This man can fall asleep sitting on a couch in a brightly lit room with a computer in his lap and Deerhoof blasting from his earbuds. You could shake him awake, but then he&amp;#039;d drop off again within seconds. He is such a sleep champion that, lying next to me, he is unaware of not only my occasional noises and movements, but also his own, which can reach quite raucous levels.  There is snoring, of course, though it&amp;#039;s a moderate alto and can usually be silenced with a sharp nudge or a Breathe Right strip. [Editorial note from husband: Ruth snores too, but I can sleep through it.] Much more disruptive is something that was once referred to in a Seinfeld episode as &amp;quot;the Jimmy legs.&amp;quot; Several times a night, Eric&amp;#039;s leg rises and then, with a crashing kick, returns to its place on the mattress. It&amp;#039;s an involuntary movement that I&amp;#039;ve never seen replicated anywhere else in nature. At first I thought this had to be Restless Leg Syndrome, the uncontrollable urge to move your legs, but after doing some reconnaissance, I&amp;#039;m almost certain that what he actually suffers from (make that, what he has and I suffer from) is Periodic Limb Movement Disorder (PLMD, and no, I am not making this stuff up). PLMD is defined by repetitive kicking caused by involuntary muscle flexion.  A quick search on Webmd.com reveals that PLMD can be treated with Klonopin, but do I really want to get my husband hooked on benzos just to solve a little after-hours goose-stepping? My therapist&amp;#039;s rather brilliant suggestion is that we upgrade to a king box spring topped with two extra-long twin mattresses side by side. It will not only give me more space, but also, when Eric does his Jimmy legs thing, I&amp;#039;m less likely to feel the level-five tremors. My therapist says that many marriages have been saved by this arrangement, known in the bedding industry as the &amp;quot;split king.&amp;quot;  The timing is perfect, as we&amp;#039;re a few months away from moving into a new house. New home, new bed, new life without sleep deprivation! But when I run the idea by my husband, he isn&amp;#039;t as keen on it.  &amp;quot;Sounds like separate beds to me,&amp;quot; he says. I try to explain that the genius of the split king is that it&amp;#039;s both separate and together, that its powers of conflict resolution could bring peace to the Gaza Strip, but he&amp;#039;s not buying it. &amp;quot;Do you want to live like some loveless 1950s couple?&amp;quot; he says. That week, he mentions it to a colleague, who says that he&amp;#039;s heard that couples who sleep in king size beds are less physically intimate. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think it will be good for us,&amp;quot; Eric says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll be able to get a decent night&amp;#039;s sleep; won&amp;#039;t that be good for us?!&amp;quot; I protest.  The lines have been drawn: I want the split king, Eric wants to stick with the queen. I don&amp;#039;t entirely blame him\u2014the queen has a custom-designed headboard of which he&amp;#039;s particularly fond. I see an extended battle on the horizon, so I retrench to plot my strategy, taking refuge on our living room couch on nights when Eric&amp;#039;s paroxysms and snores get to be too much, even with earplugs. I get the specs on the split king to make sure it will fit in our new bedroom and learn some fascinating mattress trivia: A California king is actually narrower (but longer) than a regular king, and a queen only gives a couple 30 inches of personal space each, nine inches less than if they slept alone in twin beds.  Looking for answers, I turn to the literature, of which there is surprisingly little. The only book I&amp;#039;m able to find, Two in a Bed: The Social System of Couple Bed Sharing, by University of Minnesota family social science professor Paul C. Rosenblatt, laments this as a massive oversight: &amp;quot;Most of the thousands of research reports and clinical articles on sleep are written as though people sleep alone.&amp;quot; He interviewed 42 couples, and his results make our problem seem textbook: Sleep incompatibilities emerge over time\u2014they&amp;#039;re usually there to begin with, but people ignore them during the first flush of love or temporarily adapt to the other person&amp;#039;s habit (such as staying up late). When it eventually becomes obvious that sleep is being seriously compromised, some couples upgrade to larger beds or use separate bedding. Most people sleep better with no physical contact, and many admit that they sleep better alone, although, like my dear husband, they believe in the symbolic importance of sleeping together and consider separate beds a relationship failure.  When I ask Rosenblatt about Eric&amp;#039;s colleague&amp;#039;s theory, he says, &amp;quot;Nobody said to me that couples with king-size beds have less sex, but a few people complained about having less snuggling and touching.&amp;quot; When I ask how Eric and I could resolve our disagreement, he offers: &amp;quot;Some couples tried a larger bed when they traveled, seeing if, for example, a king at a hotel or a resort seemed to work. Some bought a new bed but kept the old one, just in case.&amp;quot;  Luckily, we don&amp;#039;t have to spend a week at the Four Seasons to get a taste of life with a bigger bed. The purchase of our new house hits some snags, and we find ourselves in a temporary apartment for several months. It has a brand-new king with a gorgeous camel Ultrasuede headboard. The bed feels so big that I can barely see Eric on the other side, much less hear or feel him. I haven&amp;#039;t slept this well in years, but we do have less physical contact. To kiss good-night, we both have to do a one-and-a-half roll toward the middle of the bed. Otherwise, I&amp;#039;m in heaven.  When summer arrives, however, we spend several weekends with another couple in a country house that has only full beds. Mysteriously, I&amp;#039;m able to sleep pretty well, in part, I think, because I&amp;#039;m no longer so resentful of Eric for constantly waking me up back in the city. Our friends aren&amp;#039;t as lucky\u2014the husband automatically heads to a couch every night\u2014and it turns out his snoring is so bad that he does this when they&amp;#039;re at home, too, even though they have a king. Maybe bigger isn&amp;#039;t better\u2014maybe I just need an attitude adjustment, or should take Ambien like everyone else I know. I tell my husband that we can keep his queen for the first month or so in our new place and see how we do.  Still, a part of me wonders why it always seems as though women are more sleep-deprived than their partners. Lo and behold, there proves to be some truth to this: A 2005 survey conducted by the National Sleep Foundation found that 24 percent of women report getting less sleep than they need, compared with 19 percent of men. Their poll also showed that 39 percent of men snore, compared with a quarter of women. Moreover, 34 percent of women versus 31 percent of men said that sleep problems were hurting their relationships.  Jenny Hislop, a sleep sociologist who teaches at Keele University in England, believes that there are major gender inequalities taking place in the bedroom. What she means is that while a man&amp;#039;s sleep seems to be inviolable\u2014don&amp;#039;t wake him, he needs his rest!\u2014a woman&amp;#039;s is forever getting postponed by household jobs and interrupted by the needs of her children or even the psychological duress of her partner, such as the 2 a.m. existential crisis that just can&amp;#039;t wait until morning. A wife and mother is always considered &amp;quot;available,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;on duty,&amp;quot; even when she&amp;#039;s not actually sentient. &amp;quot;Being female within a family structure can thus be synonymous with a loss of sleeping rights,&amp;quot; Hislop writes. Forget about fat\u2014sleep is a feminist issue.  This certainly rings true with me one morning on vacation when I&amp;#039;m roused by my husband stumbling about in the dark trying to find his watch. It turns out to be 5 a.m., a fact he could&amp;#039;ve discovered if he had just slipped out of bed quietly to look at a clock. But for some reason, my need to not be woken up was less important than his need to know the time. Then again, to him, being woken up is no big deal, and he never complains if I accidentally rouse him while getting up to go to the bathroom, or deliberately nudge him awake to go deal with our kid. Establishing the absence of malice quells my pique, but, alas, doesn&amp;#039;t relieve my fatigue.  So what&amp;#039;s a woman who needs her eight a night to do? Most subjects in Hislop&amp;#039;s study continued to try to remain in bed with their partners but reserved the right to retreat to a &amp;quot;contingency relocation&amp;quot; (a couch or another bedroom). In other words, while they always started off in the same bed\u2014the equivalent of a good-faith gesture\u2014they were free to move if disruptions became intolerable. Is this empowering or subordinating, keeping two people together or pulling them apart? Hislop can&amp;#039;t decide, and neither, really, can I. I&amp;#039;d thought the whole point of the split king was that it would eliminate the need to relocate altogether, but I don&amp;#039;t know if it&amp;#039;s really that easy. At the end of Two in a Bed, Rosenblatt observes, &amp;quot;It is striking that, while saying that they sleep together, a number of couples do not always sleep together. Perhaps that is an important point about sleeping together, that it works for some couples in part because it does not go on all the time.&amp;quot; We&amp;#039;ve been in our new house for a month, and, realizing we&amp;#039;re just not sleeping as well in our old queen as we did in the temporary king, my husband is growing more open to a change. Who knows when or if we&amp;#039;ll make the switch\u2014but in the meantime, I&amp;#039;m buying a daybed for my study. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a9433/while-you-werent-sleeping-261268/>