Bryony Gordon: I fancy my husband. But we haven’t slept together in years

My husband and I have a secret that we like to keep hidden from public view.

It’s not that we’re swingers or Morris dancers, though goodness knows we nurse this information with the same levels of furtive shame as a husband and wife whose hobby involves jigging energetically with strangers when nobody is looking.

It’s more that we like to maintain the illusion that we’re a nice, normal couple, the kind you might want to invite round for dinner, or a cup of tea.

So here goes, but please let’s keep it between us: my husband and I don’t sleep together. Not in the same bed, anyway. We haven’t shared one since a particularly difficult weekend in 2015, when a stay at an elderly aunt’s necessitated us squeezing into a small double under scratchy blankets – a sweaty night kicking each other in the ribs, leaving us vowing never to repeat the ghastly experience ever again.

‘It’s not you, it’s the bed,’ I grouched to my husband the next morning, when I woke up looking (and feeling) like something out of a horror movie.

‘Well, it is you, actually, and in particular, your snoring, but I’ll forgive you as long as I get a good night’s sleep tonight.’

‘Says the woman who spent the entire night twitching in her sleep!’

‘How dare you!’ I gasped. ‘I didn’t fall asleep once!’

So, for the sake of our marriage, we decided to get sleep divorced, as opposed to properly divorced, and it’s worked out pretty well for us. Almost ten years on, we are still legally married and pretty happily so, enjoying regular conjugal relations (my bedroom is our chosen venue; my bed has a mattress topper, his doesn’t).

I love my husband, you see, and I fancy him rotten (at least when he remembers to put the bins out and unload the dishwasher). It’s just that, despite all of this, I absolutely do not want to share a bed with him.

Why am I admitting this now? Because a few days ago, it was revealed that so-called sleep divorces – whereby couples are very much together but choose to sleep apart – are on the rise.

According to new research, one in 20 homeowners say they have remortgaged to move to a bigger house or expand the one they live in to accommodate the need for two marital bedrooms. In London, where it is thought the stresses of modern life are more acute, that figure rises to one in ten.

This made me feel a lot better about my own sleep divorce, which I tend to keep to myself for fear of being bombarded with the phone numbers of marriage counsellors from couples who think that sleeping in separate beds is the death knell for any relationship. I’m pretty sure that, in our case, the opposite is true, but try explaining that to people who like to sleep spooning their partner, their limbs entwined in a romantic display of what they believe to be true love.

When we initiated our sleep divorce, we didn’t actually have a spare bedroom, living as we did in a tiny two-bed flat with a child. But my husband, being of tough military stock, could fall asleep on a haystack in a hurricane, and so he would gladly shuffle off to the sofa bed in the living room, only complaining once when he woke up to find a mouse crawling over his face. (It was still better than waking up to find me kicking him, he joked at the time. Or at least I think he joked.)

When we moved to an actual house with three bedrooms, my mother became excited about the prospect of having somewhere to stay in London. But it wasn’t to be. The spare bedroom quickly became my husband’s unofficial room, the place he would creep to once we had said goodnight. For years, we scrimped and saved in the hope of converting the loft so that, at long last, we would be able to host visitors while maintaining our sleep divorce.

And so it was that last year, we finally managed a renovation that has resulted in us now officially having separate bedrooms, with separate wardrobes, separate colour schemes, and, most importantly of all, separate beds and separate duvets.

He doesn’t have to deal with my insomnia, and I don’t have to deal with the tinny voices coming through his earbuds as he attempts to drop off to a podcast about serial killers. We are in our mid-40s now: beds are places to spend the night sleeping in, not contorting our bodies into shapes as we try to impress each other with our sexual prowess.

In the morning we are well rested, energised, and far more amenable to the kind of intimate activities that glue a relationship together. We have given each other the greatest gift of all: the ability to starfish all night in the centre of a super king bed that belongs only to ourselves.

Sleep divorces were very much the norm until the 1950s.

In many parts of Europe, twin beds pushed together are the norm, while the Scandinavian sleep method involves sleeping in the same bed but under separate duvets. In the meantime, my husband and I are very much together – til shared beds do us part.