Dear Tell All: My husband has asthma and allergies and snores up a storm. I used to be able to put up with it, but the problem is worse and worse the older he gets. He usually wakes me up in the middle of the night, and I have to roll him over to stop the racket. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Even if he does stop snoring, I often can’t fall back asleep.
I forced him to go to the Wisconsin Sleep Clinic to check for sleep apnea. He doesn’t have that, but the clinic did suggest all sorts of invasive remedies for his snoring, none of which appealed to him. I didn’t blame him.
Unfortunately, that leaves us with a serious problem. He can’t stop snoring, and I can’t sleep. We’ve agreed to try out not sleeping together, with him taking the guest room. While I’ve been getting a good night’s sleep since then, I haven’t been getting something that feels even more important: intimacy with my husband.
We still have sex, but afterwards he goes into the guest room and closes the door so I won’t hear the snoring. I’m left by myself till morning. I find myself lying there wondering why I even bothered to get married.
Is there any hope for a marriage where two people sleep apart?
Tears on My Pillow
Dear Tears: Finally, you’ve come to the right expert. While the Wisconsin Sleep Clinic offers chin straps and oral appliances, I can offer you advice to save your marriage.
Try this: Don’t just let your husband go off and close the door after sex, or even on nights when you don’t have sex. Start off sleeping together, whether it’s you in the guest room or him in the master bedroom. You can cuddle, chat and reestablish intimacy. Right before you doze off, go your separate ways. It’s the next best thing to sleeping together all night — and in your case it’s better, since you’ll be spared the snoring.
Similarly, commit to rejoining each other every morning. Don’t just roll out of your separate beds and start the day, but rather hop into one bed or the other so you can have the sensation of waking up with your spouse.
You can make sleeping separately work, Tears on My Pillow, but you have to put some effort into it. This is one of the rare cases where a closed-door policy isn’t such a bad thing.
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