I’ve had a sleep divorce... and my snoring's to blame!

Photo Credit: Mark Harrison

She tried everything from taping her mouth to lying on a tennis ball. But when her nocturnal din drove her and her husband into separate bedrooms, SUSANNAH CONSTANTINE had to take drastic action 

By SUSANNAH CONSTANTINE FOR DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 21:39, 20 November 2023 | UPDATED: 13:22, 21 November 2023

Hands up, I snore. Not a gentle purr, either, but a full-on ground-shaking double bass. How do I know this? Because people can't help hearing it. The sound travels through walls and doors like an angry ghost. It's embarrassing for me and disruptive for my poor husband.

That's not to say he doesn't snore, too. But his snoring is more polite: a low-level grunt at the beginning of the night to indicate he's asleep. It's annoying, of course, but I can control it with a swift pinch of his nose.

Sten, on the other hand, has to spend the night kicking me quiet. I wake him, he wakes me - and by morning we are both bleary-eyed, with murder on our minds.

Over the years, we've become horribly competitive about who has the least sleep and who snores the loudest and longest, with both of us lobbing accusations and denying guilt.

Our exhausted bickering ends only when one of us snaps, 'Well, I was awake all night', and effectively checkmates the other.

The thing is, men are expected to snore: it's annoying, but kind of manly.

Not so us delicate female flowers. We don't sweat, grow a beard and we certainly don't snore (ha, I'm guilty of all three!), so it always feels as though I should apologise more.

In the end, alas, we've now thrown in the towel and retreated to separate rooms. I know there's a stigma attached to this, but please don't get me wrong, I love my husband dearly.

My parents always slept in separate rooms and, as a teenager, I assumed it was because their marriage was on the rocks. But now I think it far more likely that my dad's snoring was to blame.

When Sten and I first began our sleep divorce, I worried that our kids - aged 24, 22 and 20 - would also think it was the beginning of the end; but in truth, I told them, it was the snore storms that were putting a strain on the marriage. This was the fix, not the issue.

Read the full Daily Mail article here