I Knew My Boyfriend and I Would Never Be Able to Sleep in the Same Bed. What It Did to Our Relationship Surprised Us Both.

Two months into dating Mike, I decided it was finally time to sleep over at his house.

“Time for my plugs,” I said as I placed my pink foam earplugs on the nightstand, the kind I’ve worn every night for 15 years.

“I also wear a mask,” I mentioned offhand, while washing my face. “Oh, do you happen to have a fan or something we can turn on? For the noise?”

I was hoping to seem casual, but sleep is the only area of my life where I am completely inflexible. In my 20s, I’d go weeks without falling asleep, and then I’d have to take a Xanax or an Ambien for a night. If I took these pills a second night in a row, they’d fail because my brain would force them aside to let the anxiety through, and I’d have to wait another two weeks for one night of sleep. This was my life for eight years until I found a very good therapist.

I hadn’t warned Mike I was like this. Our relationship was new and I had presented to him as cool, easygoing, and fun. I had yet to tell him about the chronic, severe insomnia I’d been dealing with since I was 19, along with the many other quirks that would eventually interfere with his life.

“Oh, that’s OK, I have trouble sleeping sometimes, too,” he said.

We went to bed. Whenever I ask my brain to sleep in a new environment, it behaves like a cornered squirrel for at least two nights before it can relax. It’s fearful and alert, trying to protect me from whatever danger could be lurking in a new and different darkness. That night, many thoughts raced through my head. What if I fart and he wakes up? What if I fall asleep but then he moves around and I wake up? What if I don’t sleep and then he sees me look puffy in the morning? I tried to relax and shut my eyes.

Then I heard it. A tiny toot from his nose. I opened one eye. He was quiet. I closed my eye. Then, a snort. I opened both eyes. What the hell was going on? I waited, and he was quiet again. Moments later, a long, rocky gasp cut through the silence as though there were stones in his throat.

Oh no, I thought. I had never experienced a snorer.

Did this happen every night? I sat up and watched him. He tried to take another breath in, a Dodge Charger accelerating with no muffler. Does it just get louder all night long? He exhaled. A rocket ship reentered Earth’s atmosphere. How was he sleeping through this? And then—nothing. I waited. I stared at him. Suddenly, a snorty burst, as though he were shaking loose one of the rocks from his throat and air could finally flow into his lungs. His breath became quiet, and I laid back down. Until the cycle began again.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked me in the morning.

“Not great,” I said, eyes red and hair flat. “I think you had some trouble breathing.”

“Yeah, I have sleep apnea. I stop breathing at night.”

“ … What?”

“I have a CPAP machine but I’ve never been able to use it.”

This was not good. I had not expected, when entering the relationship, to have to deal with someone else’s problems. I had too many of my own to worry about, and the added anxiety of a partner who stopped breathing was really too much.

We tried a couple more times to sleep in the same bed until I realized that the situation would not improve. Mike, who for some reason can sleep anywhere even though he’s unable to breathe consistently, offered to sleep on the couch. I can only sleep in a bed with three pillows, two weighted blankets, and cold air blowing on my face while listening to white noise buffered by earplugs. So I didn’t argue. I tried to make the situation fun for him by making the couch look like a bed. I felt guilty about this situation until I got used to it, like climate change.

The problem was that I kept falling more in love with him. And the more in love I felt, the more I worried that Mike would one day die. I began predicting that his untreated sleep apnea would cause a heart attack that would take him from me tomorrow. So, since the problem itself did not inspire his motivation to fix it, I tried a few tactics of my own.

“I won’t get engaged until you cure your sleep apnea,” I told him in year one. We fought about my ignorance of how uncomfortable a CPAP is and how he had been trying for a decade to use it but couldn’t. I begged him to go back to the doctor and he promised he would. Weeks went by.

“I think the CPAP looks sexy,” I said when extortion wouldn’t work.

“No it doesn’t. I’m a freak.”

And then, “I’ve called a few sleep doctors to check if they take your insurance so if you want to make an appointment it’ll be really easy. I have the numbers right here ready to go.”

“Please don’t do that. I’m a grown-up.”

When he realized that the only way to stop having the same argument over and over was to give in to me, he saw a doctor. Over the years, he saw a few more. They all told him to try using the CPAP again because it’s the only real solution to this problem, and so he did. He’d put the mask over his nose and mouth, a long plastic hose attached to a machine which forced air down his throat so that it wouldn’t close, making it difficult to exhale. I’d clean the mask and hose for him because it’s a pain to do, but it has to be done so that the machine doesn’t blow bacteria into his asthmatic lungs and cause pneumonia. Sometimes Mike can’t breathe even when he’s awake.

When he wore the mask he wouldn’t look at me and I wasn’t allowed to look at him. He felt ashamed to need it and hated the way it made him look. In his sleep, he would rip it off his face. He’d wake up without it and never know how it happened. After a while he’d give up on it. Every few months, he’d cycle in and out of attempting to use the machine. Mike became so anxious about the CPAP that he forbade talking about it at all.

Eventually, he stopped trying altogether. For years, we’ve slept apart.

On the outside, this kind of arrangement looks like a couple on the verge of breaking up. But for us it’s worked well, although I sometimes wonder if we’re just enabling each other’s bad habits. The more Mike doesn’t bother me with his snoring, the easier his snoring is for him to ignore. And the more sensitized I allow myself to be to interruptions in the atmosphere, the less I can acclimate to interruptions in the atmosphere. I hope that one day he’ll try the CPAP again and that it’ll stick. And that I can chill out a little. Then all we’ll have to do is buy a California King–sized bed, because I’ve learned during the few times we have slept together that when he turns over in his sleep on a normal-sized mattress, I end up rolling down into the ravine his body makes from being humongous.

The real problem is that I’m afraid that Mike will die, and not just from sleep apnea. Occasionally, he’ll take a two-month break from working out and healthy eating and do something like eat five Big Macs in five minutes or consume a whole pizza so quickly he gets sick. I threw him a 36^th birthday party and purchased 50 hot dogs from Costco. After he ate 11, I started begging people to take them away. I tried to cut him off but he had hidden a few in his pockets. This man has no off-switch because he can’t sleep and he therefore produces no leptin to tell him when he’s full. I love to bake but I’m terrified that the banana cream pie I make that he’ll eat in one sitting will crust up his arteries and I’ll have to explain this in my eulogy at his funeral.

Sometimes, he’ll drive somewhere in his old pickup truck that you can hear coming from a block away because it creaks as loud as a dozen attic doors opening all at once. It’s dented from when he rolled it going down an icy hill. The suspension is rusted out from rock salt. One of his side mirrors fell out of its frame a couple months ago and he rubber-banded a hand mirror to it, making it look like he found the truck in a dumpster and decided to bring it home. He’ll take this thing on the highway, on offramps, on bridges.

“He’ll die,” I think, when he drives to Target. “If that happens, I’ll die.”

What should a person do with a fear like this? A fear of the unknown, or of a new kind of darkness? My squirrely heart, fearful and alert, stays cornered by a love as life-or-death as this one feels, and I don’t know where to hide my anxiety. Two nights, two years, two decades—the more time we pass together, the denser that darkness will be without him. To watch TV, or go to the grocery store, or take a walk with Mike feels like tagging alongside all the joy and goodness that exists. It’s the closest I’ll come to wrapping my arms around the whole universe. Should he disappear, I’ll be left with the love he has given me for myself and for him, but nowhere to put all that we’ve grown together. I’ll have to repot it somewhere. And the idea of finding a new pot on the internet or at a bar or on the street seems cheap. And to plant those feelings into a dog would be an insult. I’ll have to just carry them around with me, but I’m afraid I’ll be too weak.

Mike reacts to my anxiety with patience and tenderness but, thankfully, refuses to stop being who he is—a giant redhead from Reno who extracts every last ounce of pleasure this short, difficult life has to offer. My anxiety and his recklessness are perfectly matched for a romance of pure lunacy. I just try to breathe through the worry as best I can.

Every day, I wake up in the morning, get out of bed, and make coffee for us. The sunlight washes through the blinds in the living room, where I see Mike’s feet hanging off the couch. I hear his toots and his snorts, I hear him struggle for air. I take my mug and sit at the table. I read the news or play a game, waiting for him to wake up so that I can drink my second cup of coffee with him while he has his first.