“He sleeps, his muscles tic, bob, jump ... and hit me”

PEOPLE enter marriage with all sorts of odd needs that have to be stitched in so the seams hardly show. This is the stuff of compromise, which is the stuff of relationships. But some needs are easier to harmonise than others; weird sleeping habits need to be accommodated, but they’re tricky.

Who hasn’t gone to sleep in good humour, only to wake up shivering with feet that are -2C and had a barely-conscious, yet terse debate about unequal spouse-to-duvet ratio? Conditions of warmth can be a delicate point of negotiation; my Dad decamped from a four-poster bed, which he’d purchased in a fit of post-nuptial folly, after a week, citing exhaustion from round-the-clock wakefulness. While dad slept under the stairs with eight blankets in blackout pitch, my mother slept in the four-poster under a sheet, until romance gave way to pragmatism after six weeks, when they bought twin beds and pushed them together in an arrangement that might have signified a lack of intimacy to those who didn’t know them better. “We didn’t care if it signified a lack of intimacy,” Mum says, “at least, by sleeping in twin beds, we didn’t kill it.”

My husband and I have spent the past 25 years speaking the same language of sleep. We’ve harmonised our duvet tog-and-light requirements and recalibrated sleeping positions on an ongoing basis to accommodate all sorts of variables; third-trimester bellies, small children, books, cricket scores on a radio stuck to my husband’s ear, every kind of mood, and a broken leg, but never (as in the case of a friend of mine who sleeps with two border collies and a ginger tom) pets.

We have experimented with sleeping positions, nose-to-nose (briefly), starfish and spooning, but we settled for loose entwinement followed by a mutual scuttle to opposite sides of the bed with a pillow’s width of space between us. It works. Or at least it did till now.

My new sleep routine is as follows:

1. We have done loose entwinement and scuttled to outer edges of the bed. I sink slowly into the hazy world that prefigures dead-dog sleep; the place where thoughts interrupt themselves and half-formed sentences wig-wag lazily around inside my head. My limbs loosen and I slide into oblivion with a whoosh as silent as an owl’s wing.

2. I wake up suddenly. Eyes ping wide open. I rewind and start at the beginning: I sink — more slowly this time — into a hazy world, chase the tail of wig-wagging thoughts, feel limbs loosen, slide into oblivion, whoosh … wake up. (Repeat on loop for best part of night.)

This is caused by a condition called restless leg syndrome (RLS). Don’t be fooled by its unscientific, benign appellation — it belies the true nature of the condition. It’s the second most irritating condition known to man and only pipped to the post by restless leg syndrome by proxy, which is what I have. This is characterised by extreme frustration that comes from being kept awake by someone who has RLS.

I’ve looked it up: “RLS is a neurological disorder characterised by an irresistible urge to move one’s body to stop odd sensations, which can most closely be compared to an itch in the leg muscles you can’t scratch or a tickle that won’t stop. The sensations typically begin when relaxing or trying to sleep. In addition, most individuals with RLS have limb jerking during sleep. It most commonly affects the legs, but can affect the arms, torso, and even phantom limbs (?). Moving the affected body part modulates the sensations, providing temporary relief.”

There is no mention of restless leg syndrome by proxy and there is no relief for it either. Nope, no relief for the proxy sufferer, and here’s why. Every night, following medical advice, my husband takes magnesium supplements and does his stretching exercises before entering RLS phase one: he gets into bed and twitches with extraordinary vigour for an hour, bouncing me clear off the bed while I go up and down, up and down the slide into oblivion. When I’m finally hovering on the brink of sleep, RLS phase two begins: he finds merciful relief and enters the dead-dog stage of sleep. Phase two is the unconscious phase of limb jerking. While he sleeps, his muscles tic, bob, jump and fly out any old way, hitting me. The halcyon days of plumping pillows, tethering our limbs loosely together, snuggling down in our chosen spots and drifting off in quiet companionship have disappeared, replaced by cattle-prodding on his side of the bed and furious insomnia on mine.