MindSpinner

I still sleep on one side of the bed. I don’t know how many previously coupled people do this. Presumably some of us move to the middle and stretch out. I was curious about that tonight, for no particular reason, and tried to Google an article or two or a survey on the subject. I’m not sure what it means that I still sleep one one side, four years out from divorce. Sometimes I say that it’s easier to get out of bed at night if you’re not so far from the edge, and that may be true, but that’s probably not the heart of it. I think I’m just not ready to say that there will not be someone, someday, sleeping on the other side. Google, for once, didn’t turn up one relevant thing. I did learn about romantic feng shui for the bedroom, but that wasn’t what I was after.

I knew an elderly woman a number of years ago who lost her husband after a marriage of well over half a century; theirs was a real marriage, the sort where two people become a part of each other instead of merely cohabiting or enduring. She had tears in her eyes when she explained, “Until Bill died [not his real name], I had never slept alone.” As a girl, she had slept with a sister through the years, until her wedding day. She had never spent a night apart from her husband. Ever. So there she was, well over seventy, and she had never slept alone in a bed. She did learn to sleep alone. She learned to lean more on friendships. I did see her smile again. I don’t know whether she sleeps on one side or in the middle, if she is still alive today.

What I did find on the Web, fifteen minutes into a Google search, was a batch of stories about going to bed, from the June 2001 edition of The Sun magazine. These are accounts sent in by readers; they are varied - poignant, arresting, amusing, lovely by turns. They make wonderful bedtime reading about a subject which deserves more attention than we give it, wherever we sleep in our beds.