Once again this week I had to do the embarrassing thing. Someone invited Charles and me to stay and didn’t need to mention that they were assuming we’d share a bed. Everyone assumes married couples share a bed. Even unmarried couples have to share a bed. There’s no escape. Unless, of course, you don’t love each other anymore.
Well, I guess we never loved each other then, since we had separate bedrooms from the start. I’d had the pleasure of my own bed for a while before Charles moved in and there was no way I was going to have an intruder, however desirable and exciting.
That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? That precious time, when the busy day has finished and you have a peaceful space of time to yourself, to catch up with the news, read a book, have a bath – in your own time, at your own speed, in privacy, with no-one commenting on or caring about any of your choices….that precious time is when you’re supposed to have sex.
Or wonder if you’re going to. And wonder if you’re up to it. “Wanderlust” has courageously brought some of that ‘we’ve been together a long time’ awkwardness into the public arena. We all knew that everyone else was having a raunchy time every night, but now some people are reassured that at least someone – a scriptwriter – was able to at least imagine what it might be like if you weren’t.
When you have your own room 
you can add 
whatever you like
Well, forgive me if I think that bedtime is not the best time to have sex, unless, perhaps, it’s with yourself. Which has also suddenly made it on to the screen in Wanderlust – rather improbably. With a Damart catalogue for company???!! The other portrayal – grabbing a moment of hoped for privacy before breakfast on a working day – I suppose showed just how difficult it is to have any solitary pleasure when you share a bed and then, worse! add a teenage son with the manners of a heffalump. But it was a singularly peculiar choice of timing.
I know very well what a luxury it is to have a room of your own and that it must be a distant dream for many people. We did decide not to have children and that makes an enormous difference to possibilities in the world. I also know that some people will conclude we must be unhappy. Well, I’m not one tiny bit complacent but it seems to me that having our own space and privacy enhances our lives together. I’ve never quite understood how sharing all the snoring, snuffling and other indignities of bed life help a relationship.
And it would be embarrassing, maybe impossible to try and communicate how much I love this man. So I won’t. But I would like to see an end to the tyranny of the shared bed. I have heard of people thinking they will have to divorce because they can’t stand a partner’s snoring. Which shows just how absurd this whole business has become.
And I bet many of those couples bravely and trendily attempting “Polyamory” still resign themselves to climbing into the same bed as their partner every night they’re in the same house….
Lying awake bog-eyed with tiredness while a partner farts and snores beside you is no recipe for domestic harmony. Get up to what you will during the day and in any room of the house…love is best expressed when you are actually awake. But the joy of sleeping without a partner is divine. I can sleep like a star fish, the dog has the end of the bed, and he doesn’t snore, fart, or steal the covers.
Do I have to add a dog???