Wide awake while your partner snores? Have you considered a ‘sleep divorce’?

About a year into a new relationship, Dana Infald was sleeping poorly every night — and feeling the effects during her waking hours. 

“I was tired and groggy … feeling like I was in a constant fog, horrible headaches. I definitely was not feeling myself,” the Toronto woman told The Current.

The culprit? Her new partner, who was keeping her awake — all while he was sound asleep.

“He was doing a little gymnastics routine … he would throw his legs up in the air and crash them back down,” Infald remembers.

When the lack of sleep started to affect her work, then as an early childhood educator, she sat her partner down and made a suggestion: what if they slept in separate beds?

The experiment worked. Three years later, Infald and her partner sleep peacefully in the same room, just in different beds. They’ve since gotten married and have a 13-month-old daughter.

Crucially, it hasn’t meant sacrificing their intimacy. She and her partner frequently end their days in bed together, talking or watching TV. 

“We still have our cuddles and snuggle time, but … when it is time to sleep we just say, ‘OK, time to go to the other side of the room,’” she said.

Infald’s arrangement is sometimes called a sleep divorce, where couples sleep apart but stay together. Roughly 20 per cent of couples choose to sleep separately, according to a survey of 2,006 U.S. adults published by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine in 2024. (It has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.)

Sleep researcher Neil Stanley said it’s probably more common than we realize; couples just face a taboo in talking about it. But he said poor sleep can have very serious health effects.

“From even one poor night’s sleep, the next day you’re four times more likely to catch the common cold. You’re more likely to eat sugary and fatty foods,” said Stanley, who is based in England and the co-author of A Sleep Divorce: How to Sleep Apart, Not Fall Apart. 

Longer term, he said poor sleep has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, stroke and even some cancers. 

And it affects our mood: one bad night can make us irritable and argumentative, he added.

“There’s no good thing about poor sleep, so to sacrifice your sleep … simply because you feel an obligation to share a bed with somebody — it just seems to be a strange mindset,” he said.

Mornings filled with antagonism

Journalist Nick Harding said his wife complained about his snoring for years, but it took him a long time to come around to the fact they had a problem.

“I would just tell her that I was breathing enthusiastically,” he said, admitting that consistently disturbing her sleep started to mean “a fair degree of antagonism” in the morning.

“She’d wake up in the morning after a really poor night’s sleep and would want to smother me with a pillow — and I was in denial,” said the U.K.-based journalist.

After 10 years of marriage, Harding and his wife decided on a sleep divorce nine months ago.

They now sleep in separate rooms but have put a lot of thought into finding ways to stay close, such as reuniting for morning sleep-ins on their days off or sharing a bed on weekend nights.

“It doesn’t always work, often I find myself being cast back out of the marital bedroom, but we try,” he said.

Harding thinks the sleep divorce has potentially saved his marriage.

“If we just carried on going the way we were that just would have been untenable at a point and unhealthy,” he said.

Not a rejection or failure

Harding thinks some people, particularly men, might feel rejected if their partner suggests sleeping separately — but he said couples should address that insecurity.

“I think that the point is to say that this isn’t the end of the relationship,” he said. “I’m not rejecting you … it’s actually for the good of the marriage.”

Infald agreed and said her sleep divorce has helped her and her husband to better appreciate the time they’re together. She thinks couples could give separate sleeping a trial run, even just for a night, to see how it works for them. 

Sleep expert Stanley doesn’t think that a sleep divorce is a threat to a relationship — even if societal pressure or embarrassment might make couples feel that way.

“It’s not a failure, it is just a pragmatic decision … for getting a better night’s sleep, being happier and healthier because of it,” he said.