Blanket policies fail the snuggle test

The Casanova of Wanaka and I are a great match. He is the tall to my short. My "dancing as fast as a I can" attitude to life complements his "skating round the car park in the dark" personality.

We like the same things (the exception being blue cheese), share the same values. Everything is pretty happily after - during the daytime, that is, when we’re upright. However, I’m sorry to say there’s trouble at t’mill when the sun goes down and it’s time to put our jimmy jams on.

We might be the yin to each other’s yang, but we have sleep incompatibility. I like to turn in early, lying under a pile of blankets listening to serial killer podcasts. He's a night owl, watching fail videos into the wee hours of the night. It’s not just a schedule clash: I fall asleep easily, sometimes in the middle of talking, and I’m a snorer and a space hogger. I thrash wildly, like a toddler. I like to snuggle and I run really, really hot. The quality of his sleep is strained, to say the least. The Casanova often wakes at 3, the bed a sauna; me lying on top of him, damp little paws grasping his chest hairs. Long limbed and not a small person, in trying to get away from me he ends up teetering on the edge of the bed, clinging to the bit of duvet I haven’t stolen while I intermittently knee him in the soft parts.

Sometimes he leaves the house completely and goes out into the garden for a bit of sighing. Sometimes he sleeps on the floor. I am oblivious to these night moves. "Sleep well?" I ask in the morning, happy as a wee clam who’s had her seven hours while the Casanova hunches over his coffee, red-eyed and sullen. He seemed to be hallucinating yesterday. "I just lay there, wide awake, staring into the darkness with this beast clawing me ... and you’re not even awake, just snoring. What’s worse is you move me around like one of those RealDolls. You put your nails in to get purchase ... I’ve learnt to be compliant, remain still, like when a bear attacks you ... and just hope the animal will go away."

I’ve never heard such gaslighting in my life.

If there were an element of truth to this, though, having made my bed and kicked all the covers off, it might be time for a sleep divorce, which sounds extreme, not to mention passion-killing. What is sleep divorce, you ask? It’s a thing in America apparently, where couples who interrupt each other’s nightly rest have found refuge in sleeping apart, and discovered it helps not only their shut-eye quotient, but their relationship.

Jennifer Adams, author of Sleeping Apart Not Falling Apart, and her husband have slept in separate room for 15 years. She says: "Hundreds of thousands of couples are heading to separate rooms each night and enjoying a full life, and great relationships, because they get a good night's sleep each night."

I’m not sure I want to roll over on this. It’s very Hollywood-in-the-1920s when couples kissed with their feet on the floor and slept in separate beds. Speaking of throwbacks to less liberal times: for almost a century between the 1850s and 1950s, separate beds were seen as a healthier, more modern option for couples than the double, with Victorian doctors warning that sharing a bed would allow the weaker sleeper to drain the vitality of the stronger.

In 1861, doctor, minister and health campaigner William Whitty Hall’s book Sleep: Or, the Hygiene of the Night, gloomily advised that "those who fail in this (sleeping apart), will in the end fail in health and strength of limb and brain, and will die while yet their days are not all told”.

Crikey. Brain fail and an early death, you say? I think spooning is worth it.