When you’re single and dreaming of white knights and wine and roses and endless nights of song and dance and perfect hair but instead crawl into bed with the beginnings of a hangover and lament your bad dating luck and misery of the single life, at least you know the bed belongs to YOU.
So, bereft of someone to love you and snuggle you, you take revenge upon the space you’ve carefully assigned in your mind to another and splay out as far and wide as you can get and cackle filled with glee and say something childish that amounts to, "AT LEAST MY BED IS MINE, ALL MINE, HA!"
And you sob a little, but you sleep the sleep of the hungover dead comfortably alone in your bed.
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And then you fast-forward a few years and several things happen:
1. You discover that sleeping with another person, beyond the stage of sucking in your stomach and posing in bed and pretending that your large intestine harbors no gas, is actually kind of inconvenient and not truly conducive to restful sleep.
2. You discover that sleeping with a boyfriend and later a husband AND a cat is not what is pictured in cartoons and cutesy photographs and books and your mind, but it’s actually like sleeping with a large radiator and a tiny radiator with claws, both of whom happen to be bed and cover hogs.
3. You discover that sleep as you know it is dead.
You also make more horrible discoveries that turn into funny stories as motherhood takes its toll, but I’m not here to talk about that.
I’m here to talk about the husband. Because, you see, even if sleep as you know it is no longer even on the table, sleeping with another person becomes a fun and snuggly endeavor all its own– but it sure does take time.
And once it’s taken time and you manage to find the crook of a foot in the middle of the night; or manage to know whether to start a 3 am conversation just by the rate of his breathing; and to know that you can count on your bigger radiator to have the bed toasty warm in winter; and to know that if there is a freaky noise you can always wake up "the man"; once all that is in place and he has to go and be somewhere else and you get the bed again and you splay out as much as possible so that your limbs reach all four corners of the mattress until the angle is uncomfortable enough to convince you that, yes, you have the bed to yourself again and aren’t you lucky, then you miss the warmth and the foot and the breathing and the 50-75% reduction in sleeping space and/or covers.
And that’s why tonight is ho-hum.
A Daily Dose of Zen Sarcasm! 
I love this post! There are days when I look at my dh and say “is it snuggle time yet?” because that’s my favorite time of day… and just for the record, we usually have 2 or 3 cats and a german sheppard in the full sized bed with us, too! lol…
OMG. so true. and ever since the boo and i got back from denver, we’ve been living #2. it was hard enough getting used to sleeping with the boo, he who likes to cuddle with me in the middle of the night and by ‘cuddle’ i mean crush and smoosh until it is difficult to breathe. but now my tiny radiator is all about sleeping in between us, so he’ll come over into the tiny space between boo and me and wedge in between us until both boo and i subconsciously move and kitty/radiator is now pleasantly (for him) between us (although hogging mostly my side of the bed). ARGH!
I see a lot of myself in this post. Well, up to the fast-forward-to-married part, anyway. 😦
While I still don’t like sleeping with another person (and this is kind of a problem as I come up on my 16th wedding aniversary)I do find that I miss having the guy around when he is gone. I just like his presence in the house, not necessarily his huge radiator self taking up the bed and hogging the covers (I keep an emergency blanket by the bed, he hogs so consistently).
I loved this post. I can’t really identify with either, as I’m not married, but also don’t cry myself to sleep simply because I’m alone either…but I still loved this post! 😉