- Tami Shadduck, 44, is a teacher from Florida and an advocate of sleep divorce.
- Her husband had undiagnosed sleep apnea, and she suffered from poor sleep for years.
- After Shadduck got strep in 2020, he slept in a spare room and never returned to his room again.
This essay is based on an interview with Tami Shadyac and has been edited for length and clarity.
From my husband's snoring to waking up at 5 a.m., I rarely got a good night's sleep for the first 15 years of our marriage. I love my husband, but I also love being rested.
Every night I tried so hard to sleep. Sometimes I would just pick up a book and read until my eyes got heavy. When it was really bad, I would just lie down on the couch. I could sleep, but it was a light sleep and I woke up each morning feeling badly rested.
When I first started dating my husband in 2005, he had just finished working as a contractor in a war zone, so I expected he would have sleep disorders because of his experience. Sleeping in separate rooms was never even a thought. Sharing the same bed is so ingrained in our culture that it never occurred to me to sleep in separate beds.
We first tried other treatments for his snoring.
My husband's snoring wasn't too bad when we first started dating, but over the next 15 years it got worse and worse. To say I was alert to him in the mornings is a kind way of saying it. We joked that I woke up the bear.
We tried a few different ways to solve the problem. We bought a king-size bed, thinking the extra space would help our son turn over more easily. Then we bought a sound machine designed to muffle other noises, but it was too loud and made us feel like we were sleeping on a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. We finally had a sleep test that revealed he has sleep apnea, a condition in which breathing stops and starts during sleep.
The first time I slept in a guest room, I got strep throat.
In March 2020, I had strep and slept in the guest room. After Thanksgiving dinner, I slept like an old man. After recovering from strep, I noticed I was sleeping much better and continued to sleep in the spare room.
When I decided I wanted to make a more permanent move, I started by verbalizing how happy and relaxed I felt in the morning. I think it took my husband a while to understand how I really felt, but now he also sleeps better alone because he isn't worried about waking me up.
We shared a sleeping space with other people and were amazed by their reaction.
I was vaguely aware that there were other couples who slept separately, but I didn't know anyone personally, so we decided to keep our separate bedrooms a secret. When I finally told friends and family, I felt empowered. I was surprised at how many people wanted to sleep separately. Some of my friends had had experience sleeping separately because they had small children or were sick, so they could easily empathize.
Some people might think that sleeping in separate beds would be detrimental to a relationship, but that's not the case. Intimacy comes from thousands of small moments throughout the day. To me, sleep is a healthy behavior and intimacy is part of a healthy relationship.
“I'm so grateful that my husband is interested in my health and happiness, not in his preconceived ideas of what marriage should be. If more people talked about this, we might have gotten married sooner. The more marriage is the norm, the happier couples will be.”
