MY HUSBAND AND I haven’t slept together much since we got married eight months ago. I’m not talking shtupping, I’m talking shut-eye. I’m a night owl; he’s an early bird. Although we are in sync in almost every other aspect of our relationship, when it comes to sleep, we’re completely out of step.
As a 31-year-old copywriter, I’m like many New Yorkers who staunchly follow the motto of our metropolis:At 3 a.m. I can go get a kielbasa from Veselka, tampons from Duane Reade or a MacBook tune-up at Apple’s Fifth Avenue location.This past March, several area churches even offered “24 Hours of Confession,” a gesture not lost on this nocturnal Jew. Yet one thing remains unavailable to me at an ungodly hour: my husband.
I’m not an insomniac, I am something far worse. Someone who is fully capable of falling asleep, but just doesn’t want to. On weeknights, I use sleep avoidance as procrastination. Knowing that the sooner I close my eyes, the sooner I’ll be back at work the next day gives me ammunition to stay sleepless. Mostly, I just find snoozing to be, well, a snooze. It’s boring and unproductive. After all, if I sleep all night, how can I get anything done? Thousands of cable channels aren’t going to watch themselves. Unread stacks of The New Yorker will taunt me endlessly. Hundreds of potential illnesses practically beg to be diagnosed via medical websites.
Confirming that I don’t have swine flu, meningitis or melanoma could take hours.
I admit that my late night pursuits are far from noble. The exception is the instance, long before I met Brian, when I saved a neighbor’s life simply because I was awake at 2 a.m. I smelled smoke and nervously walked through the hall in my sweatpants, until I finally heard the fire alarm.The female tenant inside had dozed off while drunkenly preparing Chicken Kiev. One fireman on the scene told me that she would have died from smoke inhalation had I not intervened. My raison d’etre suddenly became clear.Yet it occurred to me that if this girl had managed to stay awake like a sensible person—like me—the whole trauma could’ve been avoided.
I often try selling Brian on the benefits of staying up late, but he and science won’t buy my theories. Still, it’s difficult for me to understand why he requires more than my lean-yetefficient five hours to function normally. We both manage to rise each morning at 7 for fulltime jobs that demand thinking and creativity but no operating of heavy machinery.
When we first met, over vodka tonics at a dimly lit Lower East Side bar, we chatted past 3:30 a.m.; two creatures of the night. Or so I thought. Looking back, it was more likely he was hoping to get lucky. The months of courtship that followed consisted of giddy evenings laden with cheap Argentinean wine, make out sessions and conversations about existentialism. Our agenda rarely included sleep. Brian’s affinity for dozing didn’t become clear until after we tied the knot. Lost were our inexhaustible late nights, replaced instead by lame nights. Brian had seemingly gone from early thirties to downright geriatric in a matter of months. I was tempted to empty his wallet, convinced I’d find an AARP card hiding behind his New York Sports Club ID.
Soon, any indication of Brian’s looming lethargy set me off. A simple yawn triggered an army of emotions. Dread. Anger. Disgust. Desperation. I started insane arguments shouting things like “You’re abandoning me!” Or the old standby,“Just give me another half hour!” I was n’t above begging him to force his eyelids open and share the wee hours. “Couldn’t we watch In Treatment On Demand? Rearrange our dining-room furniture? Cuddle and/or grope each other inappropriately on the couch indefinitely?” Straight up sex was never a practical bargaining tool, as Zs would surely follow the big O.
I became a master manipulator, tossing out topics of interest to secure late-night bonding, such as foreign policy, the doability of Megan
Fox and stories of the years he spent playing in a band. “I think 1 a.m. is the perfect time for you to teach me guitar,” I’d proclaim excitedly. In the event that I convinced him to test his late-night limits, he quickly unraveled into a semi-conscious, drooling rag-doll version of himself. A good wife would’ve woken her husband up, led him to bed like a seeing-eye-dog and tucked him in. But I was selfish. I loved having him right there, keeping me company, even if it felt like we were re-enacting a scene from Weekend at Bernie’s.
Over time I’ve come to understand that unless I get comfortable spiking Brian’s after-dinner decaf with Red Bull or Adderall, I have to accept the fact that he isn’t going to magically morph into a late nighter like myself. In working through this realization, he and I have come up with a way to meet in the middle. When Brian begins to feel tired, he now gives me a 30minute warning so that I can prepare for his impending drowsiness.
I calmly take it as my signal to wash up, brush my teeth, change into pajamas and act as if I’m getting ready for bed. We climb under our comforter and we share in the domestic joys of pillow talk, snuggling and snogging. Roughly 45 minutes later, I head for the living room to get my evening started.
On the rarest of occasions, my eyes will close and I’ll remain asleep until the sun comes up, side-by-side, a husband and wife. But generally speaking, the guy I’m most likely to go to bed with these days is Carson Daly. Luckily, Brian is totally OK with that.
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