S l e e p e r

This Just In: Separate Bedrooms Are Allowed

Finally, it's in the paper of record. You heard it here first, you knew it in your heart; now architects are designing homes with separate bedchambers and sleeping nooks.

By the time you read this, a contractor will have just finished installing a neat hammock in someone's library, to the delight of the partner of a snorer, or someone who likes to like awake and read for hours after the co-sleeper has retired. Someone will be rejoicing that his toss-and-turn spouse will have a separate room in which to thrash about till four. It's all so sensible and intelligent.

Your mission now, sleepers, is to help erase the stigma that still lingers about this.

Because you know that alternative co-sleeping has nothing to do with that subject this site is not devoted to.

Now read the New York Times article ("To Have, Hold and Cherish, Until Bedtime").

Then turn out the light and get to it.

Separate Beds: Confronting Reality

All this talk of separate beds is not bluster. I've been earnest, although I confess to inexperience. Sigmund and Minna and Nick and Nora couldn't be wrong. We must conquer the tyranny of marketers and hotel advertsements featuring couples nestled against each other. We must decorate our subconscious with new images! (But wait: hotel rooms have either two queen beds AHA! or a king, which Sleeper posits is the culturally acceptable form of separate beds. Come on, there's an acre there.) Besides, there are all those well-rehearsed, practical reasons for occasional alternative co-sleeping arrangements.

It's just that I wandered into the bedroom of one of my heroes yesterday. Heroines, I mean. The most brilliant woman I know, half of a very long and happy and, I have always suspected, sexy marriage. My dog was lost in her house, I went up the back stairs to retrieve her, and suddenly there it was, the bed I've heard so much about, where my friend spends her mornings translating novels from the Danish.

Except it wasn't a bed, it was beds. Close together. But separate.

I felt bereft. Maybe it was the eyeglasses and opened notebooks spread out and the nightwear, the open drawer, maybe it was more than I wanted to see. Maybe I'd cooked up an image of my dear lady in a charmeuse bedjacket, it would be understandable — she gave my husband and me a copy of The Thin Man as a wedding gift.

Maybe it was the faded green coverlets?

Is Sleeper just like all those other revolutionaries who in private are barnacled to old ideas?

Freud and the Two Beds!

Now listen. It's not really breaking news that Sigmund Freud was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who lived with Sigmund and Martha for 42 years, is it? Does this surprise you at all?

Let's move on to the important thing: The room at the Schweizerhaus, the Alpine inn the two shared. Room 11, to be exact.*

Sleeper isn't saying two beds are necessarily sexy, but isn't there something about the double feather puffs that makes you want to tumble all over them? Sigmund and Minna, side by side on their sofalets, he smoking, she teasing him with a stockinged leg? Splashing up in their twinnie sinks and, afterward, he snoring away in the clarifying Alpine air, she peacefully dormant across the two-inch divide?

It's not that they couldn't get a room with a king bed. It's that there were no king beds.

Lie back, my darlings, and think about it.

*Yes, this is it. The television is new. Sleeper wagers that, if it were available in 1898, Sigmund and Minna might have watched Animal Planet in the morning.

Sexy Couples. Separate Beds.

It's time to scrap the idea that, if two people sleep apart under one roof, it's some kind of shorthand for the beginning of the end of a relationship.

Couples didn't routinely sleep together in the same bed in this country until after World War II, near as Sleeper can determine. There's lots of debate about the first  television couple to share a bed: Some say Bob and Carol Brady, some say Herman and Lily Munster. No matter the sleepers, those side-by-side twinnies weren't just a sop to broadcast morality codes: generations of couples slept with inches, feet, or whole hallways between them.

Let's get straight to the point. Sleeper posits there's pleasure in sleeping apart. If you're part of a couple, you know — admit it — that when the co-sleeper is out of town, or you're in a strange city on a business trip, it can be nice to have the whole bed to yourself. Even more exotic: there are advantages to having a separate bedroom, or dressing room.

Think about the final scene in The Thin Man: Nick and Nora in their couchette on the train en route to San Francisco. "It's a wonder a woman has any mystery left in a place like this," Myrna Loy says, stuffing her Edith Head peignoir into her valise while trying not to skewer William Powell in the ribs.

A separate dressing room is only a dream for Gothamite sleepers like Sleeper. But what's wrong with mystery? It's nice to meet up with your mate for a cocktail having not gotten ready for the date together in the same room. It's alluring. It's not that you shouldn't know each other's bodies, or that there's something to hide. It's that appearing and disappearing, coming in from the cold or from another room, is... well, enough said.

Nick and Nora, the sexiest couple in film, had separate beds at home, too. A few benefits of this arrangement: Acoustics. (Sound carries through mattresses, but not the empty space between them.) Light sleepers lie sleeping while tossers and turners do their thing. Blankets heaped on one bed, light sheet on the other. You get the idea. Sleeper does not propose an end to co-sleeping, only an enlargment of options. Could there be a single bed to slip into, in an alcove, when one has the flu? Furniture makers and interior designers, take note.

Remember, too, Asta got the top bunk to himself on that train. Although he didn't seem too happy about it.