After years of fighting, this simple change saved our marriage. It’s controversial and our friends are appalled – but, trust me, it’s the ONLY thing that really worked

The alarm sounded just before six. Groggily, I reached over to the space next to me in the double bed. I knew it was empty; it was a reflex move, like an amputee scratching a missing limb.

I was two weeks into a sleep divorce and I was struggling.

This was supposed to be a trial separation, but it was becoming permanent, and despite the discussions and the agreement (begrudgingly from my perspective), I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had failed and been rejected.

When I opened the guest bedroom door, the cat trotted in to greet me.

‘Traitor,’ I hissed, knowing that he’d spent the night with my wife in the marital bedroom. There was no point going upstairs for my ‘visiting rights’ because my wife, who wakes at 5am, would either be on the road already for work, at the gym or doing yoga in the garden.

I felt left behind.

The ‘trial’ persisted and, ten months later, Stephanie and I remain separate sleepers. While I still can’t say it is a situation I want to be in, I understand it’s for the benefit of our marriage and it is better than what came before. Especially for Stephanie, who has struggled with unhealthy sleep patterns for several years.

It is also a subject which elicits strong views and a voyeuristic curiosity, as we discovered when posting about it on social media.

Reactions split clearly along gender lines. The majority of women think it a splendid idea while men take uninvited offence on my behalf.

A few idiots from the misogynistic end of the spectrum seem genuinely angry, as if our arrangement somehow exemplifies what they perceive as a creeping emasculation of men. Some suggest that perhaps Stephanie is having an affair.

Unlike many real divorces, which often arrive suddenly after the discovery of a betrayal, sleep divorces usually creep up after months or years of increasingly fraught nights.

They can be difficult to negotiate, with the added bonus that one partner is generally living in a fog of exhaustion while the other feels fresh as a daisy.

Stephanie and I met in 2011, when I was 42 and divorced with two children, and she was 32. We moved in together in 2013, bought our house in Surrey a year later and married in 2016. If you’d told me on my wedding day that less than ten years later, we’d be in separate bedrooms, I would have seen the arrangement as a form of failure.

Stephanie, however, doesn’t see it as so much of a problem. She says: ‘I’ve always been a light sleeper, and I’ve never been good at co-sleeping. If I’m honest, I wouldn’t have seen us not sleeping together all the time, but I don’t think there is any shame in it.’

The signs were there even before we married. It began with the occasional nudge, and a whisper: ‘You’re snoring.’

I’d roll over and we’d both go back to sleep. In classic denial, I’d make excuses. ‘I’m just breathing enthusiastically.’

But a quick review of my Amazon history reveals how the problem escalated. I ordered a chin strap, nasal dilators, mouth tape, snore spray, a watch with a sound monitor that applied a small electric shock when it registered a noise above a certain decibel. I bought the book Stop Snoring The Easy Way by Dr Mike Dilkes.

I tried them all, separately and in combination. The book helped but I didn’t keep up with the daily mouth and throat workouts it prescribed. As for the gadgets, the only one that worked was a mandibular advancement device – an uncomfortable mouthpiece that pushes the jaw forward to open the airways. It reduced the volume but did not stop the problem altogether.

An app I used recorded a pattern of snoring which started with a slow low rumble and built to a crescendo of snorts, which stopped abruptly as I rolled over or was jabbed by Stephanie.

I never reached the giddy heights of the ‘extreme’ category, according to volume, but on a recent safari (during which we shared a bed for 12 nights), Stephanie mistook hippos groaning outside the lodge for my snoring.

Meanwhile, Stephanie tried every make and model of earplugs on the market. I realise this sounds like victim blaming, but it didn’t help that she found plugs uncomfortable to wear.

Eventually I gave in and called the medics. First, my GP around two years ago after an exhausted Stephanie had warned me that I was snoozing in the last chance saloon. I was referred to an NHS ENT consultant who put a camera up my nose and said there was nothing he could do. ‘All men snore,’ he shrugged. ‘Get used to it.’

Stephanie wasn’t letting me off the hook that easily, but the NHS is not a marriage guidance service. So I booked to see a private consultant instead, who put a camera down my throat.

I was under the impression by then that I was a ‘soft palate’ snorer. That means the structures at the back of the mouth relax at night and obstruct the airways, causing the snoring.

For such situations, laser surgery can be an option. But the private chap declared that my airways were healthy and open. ‘There’s no reason you should be snoring,’ he said. I was fit, healthy and not fat. Surgery wouldn’t help.

So why did I snore? There was seemingly no explanation apart from age. Twice as many men snore as women and by the age of 60, 60 per cent of men do it. Weakened throat muscles, a loss of tissue elasticity, changes in muscle tone caused by more frequent waking at night – it doesn’t matter how fit you are generally, these are age-related changes you can do little about.

The banishments began gradually, often after I’d had a few drinks. Exhausted and annoyed, Stephanie would order me from the room. I’m a back sleeper and to begin with when nudged I’d roll over onto my side, but once asleep would always roll back over, like a Weeble.

On one memorable occasion on holiday in Croatia in 2022, after being nudged awake several times, I harrumphed out of the hotel bedroom and tried to sleep on the concrete balcony because there was nowhere else to go.

Even half asleep I could feel the tension in the room. I lay in the dark for hours, hoping that Stephanie would take pity and invite me back in. She didn’t. I sulked for most of the next day, unable to comprehend how a bit of snoring could provoke such a callous reaction.

Stephanie recalls how she felt. ‘I couldn’t get back to sleep, and I didn’t feel pity or guilt. I felt angry in the moment at being woken up several times and then being fully awake.’

After that we changed our holiday preferences and now try to book suites or apartments with spare bedrooms, so I have somewhere to retreat to when given my marching orders. And I try to drink less when I know we’ll be sharing a bed.

At home, we persisted in the same bed – for a while. I was usually given three or four chances and always left reluctantly. Luckily we had extra bedrooms for me to choose from.

In hindsight we gave it a good shot, but what did for us eventually was the menopause. Stephanie’s temperature spikes, anxiety attacks and racing mind, coupled with my snoring and fidgeting, made us simply incompatible.

Even without me in the bed, she suffered significantly disrupted sleep and learned that the only way to control the symptoms was to have a strict early night pre-bed protocol involving a cool environment, stillness, silence and low light.

There was very little room in this for another person, particularly one who sometimes watched TV in bed or scrolled on his phone. We became sleep divorcees.

‘I don’t think men can imagine what it’s like being menopausal,’ says Stephanie. ‘It changes your sleeping pattern completely, and mine was poor before. It reached the point where I wasn’t thinking properly. I was sometimes awake all night and then had to drive the next morning struggling to keep awake. It was dangerous.

‘My job’s taxing. I run my own business, employ 20 people and work all over the world. I have to think very clearly when I’m with clients and that was affected.

‘Sleep exhaustion is not healthy, and it upsets everything else. You start eating badly, feeling rubbish, and making bad decisions.

‘The agreement to sleep separately was for health reasons and for our relationship, because we were both getting frustrated and annoyed and it couldn’t be left to fester.

‘There’s always been a lot of love in our marriage so it didn’t feel like an insurmountable problem, but there were days when I was exhausted because of Nick’s fidgeting and snoring, and I was frustrated with him,’ she says. 

One or two days a week became every weekday. We agreed on rules to ensure our physical relationship survived. I would sleep in the guest room (I refused to call it ‘my room’) during the week and we’d sleep together at the weekend. We still stick to that rule largely. And even if I do get sent away at the weekend, I’ll always go upstairs in the morning for a cuddle and lie-in.

There’s a further element to our sleep incompatibility that also, I suspect, splits down gender lines. Nowadays Stephanie likes to be in bed by 8.30pm to read, and even on weekends by 9.30pm. When she says that would drive me up the wall, she is right.

Still, neither of us has explicitly voiced the permanence of our sleep divorce. So is it a sign of failure in a marriage?

Dr Neil Stanley, one of Britain’s leading sleep scientists and co-author of A Sleep Divorce: How to Sleep Apart, Not Fall Apart, says emphatically not.

‘We’ve been brainwashed into believing that sleeping separately is bad for relationships,’ he says. ‘People think if you don’t sleep together, you don’t love each other any more, or you’re not having sex.’

But those are entirely separate issues, he argues. ‘Sleep and intimacy are two different things.’

Indeed, Dr Stanley believes the greatest irony is that couples often damage their relationship in the name of protecting it.

‘If you have a good night’s sleep, you’re more empathetic, you’re less likely to argue and you’re less likely to fight,’ he says. Less resentment often means more sex, not less.

‘If you don’t have to suffer, why should you? Isn’t it better to sleep separately than wake up every morning wanting to smother your partner with the pillow? How can that be romantic?

‘We discuss pretty much every other aspect of our relationship,’ he says, ‘but we never discuss sleep.’ But we should be talking about it – asking basic questions such as whether we prefer the window open or closed, what time we’d ideally go to bed, how warm we like the room or even which side of the bed we want.

Instead, he argues, couples silently compromise night after night, often without ever admitting they’re unhappy.

Listening to him, I began to wonder whether I’d been mourning the wrong thing. I had confused the loss of a symbol of intimacy (sharing a bed) with the loss of intimacy itself, when in reality sleeping separately had probably protected it.

A Global Sleep Survey of 2,000 UK adults carried out this year by the medical gadget website ResMed suggests that sleeping separately is far from unusual. More than a third (36 per cent) of people living with a partner sleep separately from them at least one night a week and one in seven (14 per cent) sleep separately every night, amounting to a full-time sleep divorce.

More than 40 per cent, meanwhile, have their sleep disrupted at least once a week by a partner, including around a third (34 per cent) who experience it several times a week. Snoring or loud breathing is the leading cause.

In the UK, insurer Direct Line estimates that around 2.5 million couples now regularly sleep in separate bedrooms, with almost half saying it has improved their relationship and more than a quarter believing it saved it altogether.

For Stephanie, there is a distinction between rejecting me as a sleep partner and rejecting me as a person.

‘I was rejecting him while he was snoring and I wasn’t worried that he’d be upset because he knows I love him,’ she says.

‘We’ve been married for ten years. He knows me better than anybody else. I’d say it was a compliment because I feel very secure in our relationship that we can have a sleep divorce and still be a loving couple,’ she says.

Like Dr Stanley, she believes too much emotional stock is placed in the act of co-sleeping.

‘I still find Nick attractive. He still finds me attractive. And any woman that you speak to will say that intimacy is not about the act itself. It’s everything else that goes around it.

‘Most women will say they can’t have sex without the emotional side; feeling safe, secure, having a laugh with someone. For me, that’s more important than sleeping in the same bed.

‘My friends are envious. When I tell them about our arrangement, they say, “How did you wing that one?”’

For me, I still miss waking up beside my wife every morning, and I probably always will. But I don’t miss the resentment, the midnight kicks in the ribs and the detrimental effect I was having on Stephanie’s health.

And sometimes it’s a blessing. During the summer heatwaves, having our own separate beds in which to spread out has been a lifesaver.

It’s true, and I won’t be swayed by the online sneerers: sometimes the best thing you can do for your marriage is say goodnight and then walk away.