Life
Is Your Enormous Bed The Reason You Aren’t Sleeping Well?
Am I the only one who thinks a cozy double bed is just right?
Not sleeping well? Maybe your bed is just too darned big.
Hear me out.
I realized the mattress norms had shifted when it started getting difficult to find linens to fit my double bed. Almost everyone has moved onto queen- and king-sized beds in recent years. So there’s usually a great selection of bedding for larger beds, but good luck finding what you want for a double bed.
I’ve even seen queen-sized beds for kids.
In old movies and TV shows, couples somehow managed to sleep in separate single beds. Dorm rooms still have single beds (and plenty of young couples have been known to spend the night together in them!)
My husband and I have kept our double bed. When we stay in hotels, we always end up with at least a queen, because that’s what people have grown to expect. And I hate it. We don’t sleep well on those giant padded platforms. The cozy factor is lost.
Do you remember when a typical hotel room had two double beds? The comparable room now has two queens.
But when we’re in a hotel bed, we have what feels like an acre of extra space, and I don’t like it. One of us has to crawl or roll across the mattress to get to the other, and then has to crawl or roll across the mattress to get out of bed.
In our double bed, we are always close to each other yet also close enough to the edge of the bed to be able to get up without having to scoot around too much.
We have enough room to roll apart from each other if we want, but we generally sleep spooned together and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
You’ve probably seen synchronized swimming; we practice synchronized sleeping. We begin with him curled up around me. A minute or so later, I curl up around him, and then we flip once more with him around me. That’s how we sleep for most of the night.
If I wake up and find he’s not curled up around me, either I curl up around him or I reach out and pat his bottom and he shifts in his sleep to hold me again.
When our little granddaughter stays with us, she and I retreat to the futon in my office. Very little sleeping occurs because she wants me to tell her story after story, but I know the days when she will still want me to cuddle her are numbered, so I don’t mind.
If you’ve ever slept with a small child, you know they can easily take up more room than a full-grown man due to the acrobatics they perform in their sleep. You’re liable to wake up with a small child’s foot wedged against your neck. Still, there’s enough room on my futon for both of us and for my beagle-mix dog Cashew, who loves to sleep on the futon.
My husband doesn’t allow our dogs to sleep with us in our bed; it is the only thing I do not like about him. Our dogs have their own doggy beds on the floor, but Cashew is always thrilled to sleep with my granddaughter and I on the futon.
When I spend the night away from home, I sleep OK by myself, but it’s not my preference.
In contrast, I know some couples sleep happily in separate bedrooms (with the occasional visits, one assumes). Others sleep in the same bed but talk about needing their own space. To each their own.
For about six months last year, we basically lived in the bed. My husband had two knee replacements and an unrelated broken leg from a work accident that kept him mostly immobile with his legs elevated and iced.
We live in an old house with tons of stairs, so making it downstairs for meals was a no-go; I served most of his meals in bed and I ate there with him. We watched more TV in that time than I’ve ever seen in my life.
Even then, the double bed never felt too small.
Of course, a huge bed takes up more floor space, too. Depending on the size of your bedroom, a larger bed can overwhelm the room. A king-size bed demands a very large bedroom to look right.
Your queen is probably bigger than a real queen’s bed.
Not far from my husband’s hometown of Heerlen in the Netherlands is Kasteel Hoensbroek. It has one of those ultra-fancy canopy beds designed for royal bedchambers … but it’s maybe three-quarters the size of my double bed! And that tiny bed is where the lord and lady of the castle slept.
No modern-day couple would be satisfied sleeping in such a small bed now, regardless of how luxurious it is. God only knows what kind of tiny beds the lesser inhabitants of the castle had to make do with.
People were generally of smaller stature seven centuries ago, of course — the suits of armor on display would barely fit a young teen and when you make your way down the cramped stairs to the dungeon, you feel like a giant. So that bed probably seemed larger to the nobles who slept there.
The other thing I really don’t understand in current bedding trends is all the ad copy that touts how their mattress/sheets/pillows will keep you cool.
Cool? As in cold? As in chilled? No thanks, I prefer to be warm and cozy under the comforter with my husband, whose body is like a furnace.
The right size and style of bed is the one in which whomever sleeps there gets the best sleep, but don’t just assume you need a huge bed. If you’re a born snuggler, you just might prefer the cozy option.