“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.