By Staff
Lee Weyhrich
For those that don't know I'm a newlywed. My wife and I have only been married for five months.
I have to admit it's an ongoing adjustment. The hardest part to get used to is the sleep situation.
Before you're married things are pretty simple, you have your own bed and if you're lucky you have your own thermostat. This means you can take up as much space in the bed as you want and you can control your own temperature.
I knew before I got married that the thermostat would be a point of contention for my wife and myself. I'm a cold weather person and she's a summer person. My ideal outside temperature is between 50 and 70 degrees, her ideal temperature is between 85 and the temperature of the surface of the sun.
If it is 70 degrees outside and my wife and I are together you will likely see me in a t-shirt and shorts and her dressed as an Eskimo.
As such I expected to be fighting to turn the thermostat down every time she left a room. Once I got married I learned a totally new thing; she only gets cold during the day.
Our house can be 30 degrees at night and she is throwing off the covers and turning down the temperature. I wake up at about three in the morning curled into a ball with my teeth chattering.
During the day the house can be 70 degrees and she's in a parka.
I also learned about all the bizarre things people do in their sleep. I've always known I talk in my sleep because sometimes I do it loud enough to wake myself up. I've never really known what I talk about just that I do it.
Now that I have a witness I look forward every morning to hearing what else I do in my sleep.
One morning I woke up to hear that I kept my wife awake all night playing the piano. We don't have a piano and the three years of piano lessons I took as a child qualify me to play any song that can be tapped out with my index finger so this came as quite a surprise.
She says I was laying on my back humming and moving my hands around like Liberache. She says she told me to stop and I told her to leave me alone until the concert was over.
I don't remember anything about any of it, but I did wake up with an overwhelming urge to wear a cape.
Sometimes I elbow her or kick her in the shins in my sleep, usually I find out about these when, in the back of my sleep dead brain, I hear the word 'ouch' followed by a sharp pain in my shin.
On top of the weird things I do she does her own weird things. My wife is easily one-third my size, but she has an amazing ability to take up more space in the bed than I do.
I found out recently from another newlywed husband that this is pretty common. He described it as his wife's ability to sleep diagonally on the bed leaving him with just one little corner to sleep on. According to him it's not uncommon for his wife to find him propped up on the nightstand in the morning.
My wife folds her body into a V shape, which means my head and shoulders can lie on the bed and my feet and legs can lay on the bed, but everything in between has to hover over the floor as my fingers and toes form a death-grip on the mattress.
I imagine I'll get used to all this eventually, but I know in 40 years of being married to my mom my dad has learned to sleep sitting up.
When I was younger I figured he learned that in Vietnam, but now I have my suspicions.
Lee Weyhrich is the Managing Editor for the Atmore Advance. His column appears weekly.Adam Prestridge is the president and publisher of Atmore Newspapers, Inc. His column appears weekly.