By Todd Craig
When I was single, I had these Cinderella dreams of life as
a couple. I romanticized growing old
together. I imagined snuggling up and
drifting to sleep in the arms of my man on cold winter nights as if life outside
were a Thomas Kincade painting.
The reality is that Thomas Kincade is dead, and his
paintings, like those dreams of snuggly sleep, weren’t real either.
The ninth anniversary of the first date with my husband will
be here in a few days. Nine years,
man. That’s a pretty good start on
something special, and it’s definitely enough time to have learned a few things
along the way.
The biggest myth these past nine years exposed is this: We don’t
snuggle up together and fall asleep in each others' arms. We’re a couple. We love each other deeply. We’re deeply devoted to one another,
too. But for us, sleeping together has
nothing to do with those single-person idyllic dreams of drifting off to
slumber amidst nightly cuddles. Instead,
the reality has been a bit of a rude awakening, pun intended, for us both in
that regard.
Sleeping Together Reality
#1 –The first sign reality differed from fantasy was when I learned that my
man has cold feet. They’re colder than
the damned sidewalk, and they’re unnaturally cold twelve months out of the
year. In the depths of winter, those
footsicles are the first things that greet me upon getting into bed.
You know those idiots who do the polar bear plunge of
jumping into an icy lake on New Year’s?
They have nothing on me. They do
their little jump once a year. Me? I do it nightly. Honestly, the temperature of his feet hovers
somewhere between Canadian cold front and Absolute Zero. Probably closer to the latter. It’s gotten so bad that I flinch when I pull
back the sheets. My testicles have
withdrawn so many times that they’re on a first name basis with my kidneys.
My spirit has been so broken that I recently bought a heated
mattress pad for us. It has twenty
different settings of heat with Level One being a gentle radiating warmth and Level 20 being enough to take a frozen pot roast to medium rare perfection
in less than three minutes. Even at that
setting and after a few minutes of thawing time, there is still a nightly
negotiation between his feet and my body that I always lose.
Sleeping Together Reality #2 – I’ll be the first to admit, I love snuggling. I love to pull my husband close to me, drape
my right arm across his bare torso, and hold him close to me. Sounds good, right? Not to him.
In his world, my arm weighs about thirty pounds. The weight of my arm is uncomfortable and
confining to him, so there’s no possible way he can get to sleep like that. Every time I reach across with my arm, in his
mind I might as well be laying a sandbag across his chest.
Turnabout is fair play, for as much as I like to snuggle
with my arms, my husband likes to get a leg up on the competition, pun intended
again, by snuggling with his legs. He
has this weird thing about not wanting his knees to touch, and his solution to
this problem is to throw one or both of his legs over me once I’m asleep. I don’t know if anyone else in the world has
ever had this done to him, but let me inform you, having half of a person
draped over you twists your spine in some rather unnatural positions that even the
Karma Sutra would take a pass on.
Sleeping Together Reality #3 – Never in all my years of dating did any boy ever tell me that
I snored. There are probably a number of
reasons that I never heard this, including the fact that many times we didn’t
actually get to the whole sleeping part of the night, but regardless, I’ve
always believed that I was a silent sleeper.
To hear my husband tell it, however, my breathing is the
perfect combination of the whistling winds in a canyon, the roaring engine of a
747 taking off, and a truck downshifting on the interstate. A couple of weeks ago I was in a deep, dark
sleep when all of a sudden, WHAM! I got
an elbow in the ribs.
“What was that for?” I mumbled.
“You were breathing out of your mouth funny. You were making this weird clicking noise! Shhhhhh-pop! Shhhhh-pop! Shhhhh-pop!
Over and over and over again.”
I began to comment that I was probably laboring to breathe due to
the fact that I had his legs draped over me when I was elbowed in the chest a
second time. He suggested that I should
keep my mouth shut while I was both asleep
and awake if I didn’t want any more pointed elbows heading my direction. That harsh reality was colder than my husband’s
feet, and it was enough to convince me to roll over and keep my smart ass
comments to myself.
All in all, there’s nothing quite like falling in love with
the man of your dreams. The Cinderella
story is well known to us all, and when you’re single you cling to those relationship
dreams and all of the idyllic images that go along with them to get you through
the challenges of dating and the single life.
Reality isn’t always perfect, however. Sometimes Prince Charming has cold
feet. Sometimes Prince Charming snores.
And the reality of sleeping with someone, like those elbows
to the ribs, can be a bit of a rude awakening from what you hoped it would be.
I love my husband with all of my heart, and marrying him is
the best thing that I’ve ever done.
Would knowing that we wouldn’t be snuggling blissfully to sleep every
night for the rest of our lives change my single mind about marrying him?
Would his cold feet have given me cold feet?
Nah.
