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Scientist to Men: Don't sleep over

By purepedantry on August 1, 2006.

Muahaha. It has now been proven that men should not sleep over:

If you have ever thought you were stupid to sleep with someone, consider this. Sharing your bed could actually make you stupid if you are a man - at least temporarily.

Even without having sex, bed sharing disturbs sleep quality, say Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues from the University of Vienna, Austria. The team recruited eight unmarried, childless couples, and used questionnaires and a wrist activity monitor, an "actigraph", to assess sleep patterns after 10 nights together and 10 apart.

Men and women fared differently. While men thought they slept better with a partner, and women believed they didn't, actually both sexes had more disturbed sleep, even when they did not have sex. Lack of sleep led to increased stress hormone levels in men, and reduced their ability to perform simple cognitive tests the next day.

I had a big problem with this for a while. An ex-girlfriend of mine and I used to have all sorts of problems sleeping in the same bed because we would always have a difference of opinion over the temperature. She said that I wanted the room to be refrigerated, but I insisted that it was only cold to her because she was hotter than the surface of the Sun. (At the time, in a truly bachelor-like way, I also had a blanket that was much too small for the bed it was on...a twin-sized blanket on a queen-sized bed...yeah, that didn't work so well...but I am certain that had nothing to do with it.)

Anyway, this proves it. In all future relationships we should be sleeping in Lucy-Desi beds or, even better, we should do the Mia Farrow-Woody Allen thing and have totally separate apartments. (Preferrably not following that with hooking up with my adopted Asian daughter...that I should avoid...but the rest is good.)

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Now that you mention it, did Hollywood ever take responsibility for the fact that having married adults sleep separately on The Dick Van Dyke Show or I Love Lucy permanently scar the sexual psyche of an entire generation by leading us to think that our parents were part of some bizarre sex cult by their sleeping together in the same bed???

What bugs me about this study, beds! If the bed transmits the couples movement, and we all move in bed. Can the bed type be more of a factor, than the separation. In a real study the bed would have been part of the study, box-spring, foam + vasoelastic, board, what ever. There seems to be no isolation of the bed type. And hence the study does not indicate why they disturb each other.