The Mattress Wars

Marriage changes passion. Suddenly you’re in bed with a relative.

I can’t remember who thought this saying up, but I’m sure it was a woman who was lying awake while her spouse snored loudly beside her.

This is not 1973, I remind myself. This is not some hotel in Chatham. You are not on your family’s annual vacation to the Cape, and this is not your sister lying next to you in the same bed, hogging all the blankets, breathing on you and periodically slamming her leg against the mattress so hard the entire bed shakes. No, this is your husband—the man you love, the man you voluntarily chose to spend the next one hundred years sleeping beside, which right now, at three in the morning, seems like a very bad choice, but what did you know? Who can predict these things? He slept like a dead person (and so did you) until your early thirties, at which point you stopped sleeping and he started driving his pigs to market in the middle of the night.