I moved into the apartment my husband and I had leased together on the day we arrived home from our honeymoon. He’d been living there for a month or so, but I didn’t want to live together before the wedding.
Moving in was an adjustment for both of us. He’d had the run of the place for four to six weeks. Now, suddenly, he had another person sharing the tiny space.
I’m sure he wasn’t pleased. I wasn’t pleased either.
The bed was barely big enough for both of us. We’d bought it from the daughter of the woman who’d recently passed away upstairs.
Maybe if we were cuddly sleepers, the bed would have sufficed, but we were not cuddly sleepers. We were both “don’t-touch-me-not-even-by-accident-while-I’m-sleeping” sleepers.
Less than one year later, we moved into our second apartment, but we brought along the same bed.
The bedroom was almost the same size as the one in our last apartment, but it had slanted ceilings so you could only stand straight in the center of the room and had to hunch over as you got to the outer walls.
A year after that, we moved into our third and final place together. We bought a four-bedroom house and decided to share the only bedroom with a closet.
I turned one of the other bedrooms into my office. The remaining two bedrooms stayed empty.
Nearly three years later, mere months before I would move back in with my parents, I decided to leave our shared bedroom for the empty spare room across the hall.
I moved in a solid wood bookshelf that was in the garage when we bought the house, a bedframe, a used mattress and boxspring from my parent’s house, and a single potted plant that had a slug living in it.
I was so much happier than I had been sharing a room with my husband.
My room was neat and tidy. It was sparse, but it was also bright and had light shining in through two big windows hung with gauzy pale blue curtains that blew in the breeze when the windows were open.
His bedroom, which we had once shared, was cluttered, messy, and smelled like the unwashed man who slept in it. His sheets were greasy and stained. His closet, the only closet in the house, became a mountain of his washed and unwashed clothes in one shared pile.
I got the best sleep of my life once I moved across the hallway.
Everything about sleeping alone was better than sleeping beside the man I’d married. I supposed it didn’t help that I’d married the wrong man.
The best thing about sleeping in separate bedrooms was this: Our new sleeping arrangements helped me figure out I’d be even happier if I moved out of the house altogether.
This article was originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission from the author.
