Separate Master Bedrooms

Someone once said that the secret to marital bliss is separate bathrooms. My husband and I would like to take that one step further and say that separate master bedrooms help a lot, too. I remember when my own parents, still happily married for nearly 50 years now, started sleeping in separate bedrooms. My older brother moved out and my mother moved in to his room. My father snored and my mother had an aching back.

Setting up separate master bedrooms was ideal for them. In later years, they even added on to the room where my mother sleeps so she would have more space for her sewing, quilt-making and writing. As a couple, they are close. They often take weekend trips to the mountains of Tennessee and enjoy their time together and don't mind being close in their pull-along pop-up camper. I think separate master bedrooms might have saved their marriage from the stress of a bad night's sleep.

As a teen, I saw my parents' separate master bedrooms as a sign of something amiss in the marriage. After a few weeks, my parents were more rested and I saw that separate master bedrooms had not created anything but good news for their marriage. Fast forward to my life today and you will find me in the midst of baby/small children parenting. During much of pregnancy with my first child, any movement from my husband in bed would wake me; make me feel nauseated or just plain annoyed that I had been woken. Other times my back and legs would ache so much that I'd keep him awake by tossing and turning. It only took a week or two before I was sneaking out of bed to sleep in the guest room after my husband fell asleep.

When my husband began getting up before 4am and working a 12 hour day when our oldest was only 6 weeks old, I moved out of the bedroom. Co-sleeping with my infant was important and as much as my husband enjoyed it, my son nursed all night and had reflux leading to very little sleep for any us. Not wanting my husband to go to work exhausted, I moved permanently into the guest room with baby. Since then we've had two more sons and have played musical 'family' beds. My sons slept alone in their own bed by the age of one but from time to time still want to sleep with either mommy or daddy. Separate master bedrooms have kept this family from being squished into one queen sized bed on stormy nights or having more than one sick child in bed at a time.

After my second son was sleeping alone in his own bed, my husband and I attempted to share a bed again. It did not work out so well. Instead of putting our youngest, now an older baby, in a bedroom alone, we turned his room into a separate master bedroom for my husband. We have decided that when we build our dream home someday, we will likely have separate master bedrooms, possibly even separate wings.

I know the obvious question here. What about our sex life? Well, frankly, it's no one business, but I will say that it does not suffer because of separate master bedrooms. For one thing, sharing a bed with a child or having a child sleeping in the same room completely puts the brakes on my sex drive. My husband works eighty hours per week, goes to bed a few hours earlier than I, and three nights per week is at work while I am sleeping. The bedroom is a place to sleep, for us. Romance, by necessity, is more spontaneous than ever and separate master bedrooms help us, rather than hurt us.

Separate master bedrooms seem to be a growing trend and the stigma about them is lessening. More couples are seeing the benefits of not having to share a sleeping space and feeling better rested. A well rested, non-aching partner is a good thing and separate master bedrooms may be just the prescription for couples who find that bed-sharing is leaving them stressed. As far as romance is concerned, separate master bedrooms can lend some excitement and mystery to stale love-life.