Award-winning actress and singer Bette Midler sat for an interview with Entertainment Tonight in 2024. Among other things, Midler shared the truncated secret to her almost 40-yearlong marriage: “Separate bedrooms. My husband snores.”
Midler echoes the voices of other celebrities, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Baz Luhrmann, Gillian Anderson, and Cameron Diaz, who are increasingly speaking up about their own “sleep divorces,” or consistently sleeping separately from partners. In a December 2023 Lipstick on the Rim podcast episode, Diaz went so far as to say, “We should normalize separate bedrooms.”
In attuning ourselves to this A-list chorus, we might predictably ask: Which came first? Everyday couples sleeping apart or celebrities popularizing it? New data seems to suggest it’s a bit of both. Whatever the case, sleep divorces have awakened our collective psyche. Case in point, a 2023 American Academy of Sleep Medicine survey found that 43 percent of millennials in a committed relationship sleep alone either “occasionally” or “consistently.” Additionally, 33 percent of Generation Xers and 28 percent of Zers also “occasionally” or “consistently” sleep away from their significant others.
Sociologists have admittedly snoozed through some of the recent sleep divorce momentum. Sleep experts and marital therapists are more astute. As with Midler’s marriage, sleep experts note the resounding reason for sleep divorces is snoring. Secondary reasons include children getting up at night, separate work schedules, and restlessness. The throughline here is that partners are consistently prioritizing quality sleep for themselves and each other. Could separate snore rooms actually be the ultimate love language?
Marital therapists are grappling with this question. Some note that sleeping apart leads to more purposeful and affective intimacy. Others suggest that separate beds are an incubator for avoidance. It seems the goodness or badness of sleep divorces also depends on the route taken. Marital therapists observe that couples who mutually explore and communicate their feelings are more likely to positively experience separate sleeping arrangements.
In addition, defining a modern “sleep divorce” can tricky. Some couples sleep separately one night a week, where the couch is bed #2. Others opt for completely separate bedrooms, where each partner’s space embodies their own personalities, preferences, and needs. Multiple iterations exist between these poles. Antidotal experiences suggest that personal advocacy and communication are critical in explorations of this sleep divorce spectrum; and trial runs can precipitate a more permanent slide toward sleep independence. Most recently, the socially constructed gamut of modern sleep divorce was deftly explored in Nathan Hill’s marital fiction book Wellness. Here, spouses Jack and Elizabeth explore the emotion and pragmatics behind an occasional night on the sofa to separate primary bedrooms.
While there is a recent cultural awakening to sleep divorces, separate sleeping arrangements have been around for a long, long time. In fact, couples slept separately as early as the Roman Empire. Historically, their popularity has waxed and waned depending on partners’ interactions with law, culture, economics, and each other. There is a constructedness to the experience. Thus, while the practice is not new, the meaning of separate beds has changed significantly. In regard to family life, sleeping arrangements continue to speak volumes about our relationship roles, norms, values, choices, constraints, and priorities. Sleeping arrangements also illuminate social change.
Sociologically speaking, modern sleep divorces jive with the continued iterations and adaptions of companionate marriage, which became a cultural standard in the Industrial Revolution. As Western laws, markets, and culture moved away from a purely economic conceptualization of marital unions, this marriage emerged as an alternative. It was an experiment in the alchemy of economics, love, happiness, and (limited) independence. Skeptics said this was too much for marriage to bear; and attaching emotion to marriage would make the institution entirely too volatile. Companionate marriages were also distinctly bourgeois. Enter Bridgerton, Jane Austen, and The Crown.
In the late Victorian Era, separate beds were encouraged among the companionate bourgeoisie. After all, they had the space to spread out and marriage had lots to accomplish. Intimacy was confined to “the marital bed” and primarily for the purposes of reproduction. Ironically, sleep divorces encouraged both procreation and marital chasteness. Separate beds were also deemed better for one’s overall health, ultimately translating into better sexual and reproductive fitness. The emphasis on procreation also bolstered the economy and patriarchy where happiness for women was meant to be found inside the confines of marriage.
Despite wholesome visuals of couples sleeping apart in shows like I Love Lucy, separate beds fell out of vogue in the 1950s. This cult of togetherness era was fueled by galloping economic growth, distinctive and gendered divisions of household labor, and underscored emphasis of the nuclear family. The nuclear family simply had to work as both a function of the economy and its wellspring. Intimacy was a big puzzle piece. Women were encouraged to be sexually available to their hard-working, primary bread-winning husbands. This time around, sleeping together fueled economic growth and patriarchal underpinnings.
Our current sleep divorce inflection point is often described as Midler did: snoring management. But our sociological imaginations tell us there’s a much larger story. Snoring might be the short answer, but behind the zzzs, couples are trying on and sizing up companionate marriage principles. Thus, sleep divorce is essentially a constellation of emotional steadfastness, independence, gender roles, cultural ques, negotiation, economics, and much more. Lucky for us, ongoing normalization and conversations illuminate what sleep divorce truly is: the experience of society stored inside us.
Kirk is a guest blogger at UITAC Publishing. UITAC’s mission is to provide high-quality, affordable, and socially responsible online course materials.
Images used in this blog:
- “People, Man, Woman image” by StockSnap is licensed on Pixabay. This image has not been altered.
- “Woman Lying on Bed with a Man” by Kampus Production is licensed on Pexels. This image has not been altered.
- “Beds in Hotel Room” by Aleksandra Platonova is licensed on Pexels. This image has not been altered.
