Things my wife hates about me: bedroom behavior

Fourth in an occasional series about things my wife hates about me. Earlier installments include my beard, movie-blurting, and my love for trivia.

When my wife, Carissa, and I were first married 23 years ago, she was fresh out of college looking for work and I wrote for a small daily newspaper. So basically we were broke. We rented a studio apartment in the basement of an old house. Once, a neighbor next door shot a hole through the wall of the apartment directly above us while “cleaning his gun” during an argument with his girlfriend. Welcome to Twin Falls, Idaho. Another time, the large, hairy, sweaty guy upstairs pounded on our door at 2 a.m. on a week night to ask if we’d like to join him in knocking off the rest of the jug of Thunderbird wine he was clutching. We politely declined.

Not the nicest living situation, but we were young and living on love. Well, love and a lot of potatoes because Idaho. Our cozy apartment didn’t have a bedroom, but it had a big windowless storage room just off the bathroom. We pulled a single-sized mattress into what was essentially a closet and instantly converted it to our master suite. We are tall people and even one of us did not fit on that mattress all that well. But we did not care. Love and such.

Well, eventually we cared. Love has its limits. As soon as we could afford it, we moved into an apartment with a real bedroom and finally had room for my waterbed from college with the double-sized mattress. Don’t judge. It was a different time. It was also only marginally better than a single mattress on the floor. The heater for my old waterbed that kept the mattress at body temperature and thus prevented hypothermia did not work and I hadn’t bothered to replace it. We slept on top of an unzipped sleeping back, flannel-lining side up and nylon side against the frigid bladder. The sleeping bag slipped and slid on the plastic surface of the frigid bladder. Even the gentlest movement created waves in bed. The metaphorical kind, yes, but also the real kind that tended to slosh Carissa around the bed. This is also about the point in our relationship we were becoming less tolerant and more territorial about encroachments on to “our” sides of the bed.

Some will be surprised about this next admission: I don’t get a lot of requests for marital advice. But if some enterprising young couple were to ever ask me for the secret to a long and happy marriage, I would tell them to purchase the biggest, most expensive mattress that they can afford. Or max out your credit cards, cash out your 401K savings if necessary. Whatever. Just do it. Nothing will strengthen your marriage like a fancy king-size posture-pedic-style mattress. At least that worked for us. We sold the waterbed to a college kid and moved up to bigger and better.

This is not to say that everything is great in the bedroom these days. Don’t freak out. This is the PG -13 version of things I do in the bedroom that Carissa hates with a white hot intensity. I was willing to take this up to NR-17, but Carissa shot that right down. What I’m talking about here is the normal, routine every-day things that drive my wife up the wall.

That everything is not “great” is not a surprise, to be honest. We’ve spent, by my estimate, more than 8,000 nights together over the more than twenty years we have been married. You spend that much time with another person – even your soul mate, especially your soul mate – something about that person’s bedtime routine will annoy you. Especially if that person is me, it turns out. Most of my conflict-creating bedroom conduct can be traced to the fact that I’m content with six hours of sleep while Carissa holds strongly to the eight-hour rule.

That means on a typical night we go to bed with different expectations for the 9:30-11:30 p.m. time slot. Carissa is there to sleep. I am there to chat about the day, bitch about things we don’t want our kids to overhear us bitching about (them, their friends, their teachers, our families, the neighbors, etc.). This plan generally is rejected quickly, so I move to Plan B. Reading or web surfing. This also is a problem because after 9:30 p.m., Carissa’s super power becomes the ability to detect even the slightest hint of light. Turn on a night light or open an iPad in bed and tiny particles of light will reflect and refract directly into her retina, causing tremendous irritation, even when her eyes are closed. Next I will try Plan C: Shut down all light-emitting sources, tiptoe down the hallway and into the kitchen for a nightcap, a little whiskey on the rocks.

Oops. Bad move. Carissa’s other nighttime super power is enhanced auditory sensitivity. I can generally pull off opening the cupboard that holds the bourbon without detection. But the sound of the refrigerator’s ice dispenser dropping a few cubes into a glass apparently approximates the sound of ten thousand howling demons burning in a sea of molten lava. No bueno. And then I come back to bed and set the glass on the nightstand without using a coaster. Double no bueno.

You would think that after a few thousand exchanges about my bedtime habits, I would look for solutions. Like maybe drinking whiskey neat instead of on the rocks or investing in night-vision reading glasses. Sometimes I fantasize about building a Dad Pad™ out back where I could live but still see Carissa and the kids every day. It would be a pretty cool place. I’d grill steaks on my industrial quality grill and Carissa and the kids could come over for dinner. After dinner, we could watch baseball on my sweet big screen. Then at bedtime, Carissa and the kids could go home to sleep and I could sit up watching the end of the game, reading a book with all the lights on, and operating the ice dispenser on my fridge full of beer with reckless abandon. When I was goddamn good and ready, I’d turn off the game and crawl into my king-size water bed with a heater and wave-controlling baffles and turn off the night light.

In theory, a terrific plan. But I’d miss that 9:30-11:30 p.m. time slot with Carissa. The reality is that a successful marriage is about compromise. And a king-sized bed. But mostly compromise. I pretty much suck as a partner if you want to go to sleep at 9:30. But Carissa on most nights will sacrifice an hour of sleep to rehash the day’s events with me. And on most nights I will turn off the lights before I would prefer and lie perfectly still so she can sleep. In our king-sized bed with extra fancy pillows. While I fantasize about creating the perfect Dad Pad™.