On sleeping together

A little while ago I was talking to someone about a guy she’d been seeing over the summer. They first met in a bar one Friday night, and went back to his place for sex at the end of the evening.

“When we woke up on the Saturday, he asked whether I had any plans for the day. We wound up just staying in his bed having sex, and the same thing happened on Sunday too. I didn’t leave till Tuesday morning.”

She said it so casually, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. Four nights and three days of lazing around with a sexy stranger, shagging like bunnies – what’s not to love? In truth though, just listening to her describe that scenario made me a little panicky. Claustrophobic too, in a way that I was almost embarrassed to articulate.

Thinking about it afterwards, I tried to imagine how I’d actually feel in that guy’s shoes. I’ve brought people home at the end of first dates before, of course, but always with the expectation that they’ll leave at some point – if not later that night, then certainly the  next morning. The idea that they might not – that they might stay in my flat, sleep in my bed – for four whole nights feels so alien to me these days that we may as well be talking about a month or a year.

And yet, I don’t think that was always the case. There was a time when I embraced intimacy with less caution, even in the earliest stages of a romance. I was more naive then, of course, but also incredibly open with my thoughts and feelings; open with my life generally. I guess I had less to protect back then, and while I’ve always been fairly solitary by nature, I wasn’t yet so used to being alone.

I’m going to explore that change a bit more over the next few weeks, I think. For reasons I’ll explain in an upcoming blog post, November 2005 was a pretty important month for me, so 10 years on it feels appropriate to look back at its impact in more detail; part of that will inevitably touch on intimacy, and what I guess could be described as my shifting relationship with it.

Right now though, I’m going to limit myself to writing about a specific bit of my friend’s story. It struck a chord because even with people I know well, sleeping together – actually sleeping – is not something I always find easy; with strangers, it often makes me far more uncomfortable than I like to admit.

Look, I love sleep, and for the most part I’m really fucking good at it. I might not always get a solid eight hours, but I don’t suffer from anything approaching insomnia unless I’m really stressed, which means that when I’m on my own any lack of sleep can mostly be chalked up to my inner night owl. If I go to bed far too late – and I do – it’s for what I think of as good, happy reasons, powered by my natural circadian rhythms. Who doesn’t have more fun after dark, right? The flip side is that I’m really not a morning person, even now; I don’t bounce out of bed at 6am, ready to face the day, and if I’m forced to get by on less than 5-6 hours I will rarely be happy about doing so.

It’s natural, then, that having someone else in bed next to me can disrupt things. I’m obviously fine with it immediately after sex – I’m free and easy when it comes to post-coital snuggling – nor is it because I need to starfish across the mattress when I do go to sleep. I slept in a single bed till I was 24, and even now all I really need is a steady, constant amount of space…at some point though, that’s the bit that tends to be problematic. Other people don’t just take up their own portion of the bed – in many cases, they have an unfortunate habit of encroaching on mine too. And when they cross that border, they often do something even more disruptive, even more alarming: they touch me.

More often than not, the raid comes in the very early morning, long before the alarm is due to go off. Lost in the depths of whatever dream I’m having, my brain will find itself pulled up slowly towards the surface; not until it’s bobbing up and down on the waves do I tend to register the hand gently caressing my back, or the fingers playing with my hair. Sometimes it curves round my body to brush over my cock, testing how ready I am to pick up wherever we left off a few hours earlier.

It’s always done with the best of intentions, which is why I’m slightly ashamed to admit that my standard response in that situation is to keep my eyes closed and pretend I’m still asleep, in the hope that the other person will lose interest and roll back over. If that fails, I might try to bat their hand away, or shift position so I’m lying on my front, as if doing so might somehow signal ‘closed for business’. Some partners get that hint, but others don’t – instead they double down and become more insistent in their attentions, as I lie there with teeth gritted and all hope of further sleep diminishing rapidly.

That’s ridiculous, right? Absolutely crazy. If I don’t like being touched – disturbed generally – in my sleep, I should just be able to say so. “Don’t wake me up for sex – please, just don’t” – there, how hard is that? All those idiotic avoidance tactics achieve the square root of fuck all, especially with someone I’m going to see more than once. Even worse, the prospect of doing that awkward dance is what makes me choose a night bus or an expensive taxi home after sex, rather than risk having my sleep disrupted in a new partner’s bed; sometimes that’s fine, of course, but it does feel like there ought to be a better reason for taking off than “aargh, I don’t want to be cuddled all night or woken for sex, and I don’t know how to tell you that.”

If leaving someone else’s house late at night can be tricky, indicating that I’d rather they didn’t stay over at mine is even more uncomfortable. It’s sort of fine if we know beforehand – or early in the date – that sex is on the cards, as there’s then time to figure out the logistics in a sensible way, but if I have someone back at my place late at night it’s obviously not acceptable just to chuck them out onto the street and expect them to make their way home. That’s not just bad manners, it potentially puts them in danger, especially if they don’t know the area or live far away.

All this just feeds into and reinforces my instinctive horror at my friend’s story. Alongside that horror though, is just a little bit of envy. I’m a private person, and I guard my own space more fiercely than I should, so anyone who doesn’t – who actually opens themselves up to someone new without thought or hesitation – is difficult for me to understand. I don’t know if I should buy them a drink or question their sanity.

Either way, it makes me really appreciate any relationship, casual or serious, that manages to push past that first set of intimacy barriers. I’m lucky enough to have people in my life who I can sleep with these days, and who make me happy and relaxed when they share my bed, rather than edgy and tense. Whether for good reasons or bad, I think I value that more now than I ever have done before.