“Do you think anyone has ever divorced her husband over snoring? Asking for a friend."
I jokingly wrote this on social media a few weeks ago because I was up late listening to my husband slumber away. When I say that I was listening to him sleep, I mean I was unfortunately really listening. There he lay, a foot away from me, snoring loud enough to shake the walls of our home (I swear it). It was the loudest, most wretched sound I can describe to you good readers: a mixture of gurgling, choking, gasping, coughing, mumbling, and good old traditional snoring. A real medley of marital unhappiness, if you will.
This is the soundtrack to my life between the hours of 10 p.m. and six a.m., and it has been like this for a number of years. Unfortunately, as we enter middle age, the snoring is only getting worse. The infant cries in the night have been replaced by this crap and, sadly, I can't just pop a bottle in the hubs and make the noise cease.
I roll him "beached whale style” constantly, jab him in his ribs hard enough to leave him with physical reminders of my constant frustration and irritation, and wake him out of his pseudo-slumber several times a night in hopes that I can quickly fall asleep as he startles awake and tries to settle himself back down. My tactics no longer even leave a dent in the snoring.
Just a few years back he used to snore only after he had a few beers or stayed up late watching sports. Now I swear it starts before he has fully closed his eyeballs. I don't think he even has to be asleep to snore!
I used to become agitated, but I could deal...or move beds. I am a mother to four young daughters, so musical beds is nothing new to me. As the snoring developed into a nightly experience, my agitation also developed into anger, aggression, and really negative emotions. Every single morning we would bicker via text regarding the previous night's snore-a-thon.
Why doesn't he go sleep on the couch? When is he going to call and schedule a sleep study or buy some fancy mouth guard over the internet? Why doesn't he care that his sleep selfishness is causing me to be exhausted and perpetually pissed off at him?
At the root of it all, this marital impasse wasn't about the actual act of snoring. It was about something so much deeper: Why does he always come first? Does he think that he needs rest more than me because he has a high stress job that requires him to keep people alive while I'm at home vacuuming and doing laundry? When we jointly decided that he would work stressful, late hours at the hospital and I would give up teaching to become a Goddess of Domesticity, did I accidentally also give up my right to a good night's sleep? Did I sign on some dotted line that I agreed to be the lesser person in this marriage and, therefore, if one of us had to sacrifice rest, it would automatically be me so that he could be his best?
Well, hold the phone dammit!
I started to firmly believe that his nightly snoring was a personal attack on my wellbeing. He might as well kiss me good night and then say, "Good night. If you get no sleep tonight that's probably okay because you stay home all day and do nothing, so rest up then." Of course he never said that, he isn't suicidal or anything. In fact, he never said anything other than sorry or that he doesn't mean to snore. Sorry didn't matter to me though, the resentment was so thick you could slice it with a knife.
Now I'm not exactly the type of woman who bottles up her emotions and buries them deep down in the depths of her soul. No. If I'm pissed, you'll know about it. If you've upset me, you'll hear about it, over and over and over again. There's no guesswork in deciphering how I'm feeling. He knew that the snoring was causing major anger and rifts in our marriage. I made it fairly clear to him.
Snoring! People fall apart over money, stress, jobs, lies, but not freaking snoring, unless the issue is of course not about snoring at all. So why didn't he just do something about it!?
As usual, we had to hit marital rock bottom before we were able to discuss the "whys." Beneath his gurgling, snoring, middle-age manliness was some serious insecurity he was dealing with all by himself. Unlike me, my husband is the kind of person who bottles up his emotions and pushes them deep down only to have them explode once in a great while. He knew that he'd gained some middle age weight, which was contributing to the snoring. Even though he runs each and every day, he too was struggling with the beast that is "the thirties tire." Facing middle age was another mirror that my husband wasn't wanting to look in. While I seem to be accepting the fact that we are getting older, fatter, and grayer, he isn't accepting that as easily. He still wants to eat, live, and drink like he's 23 years old. No one wants to admit the golden days are long gone, I suppose.
So he kept on denying his snoring and I kept on hating him – every day – until we were able to get down to the root of his insecurity and the root of my feelings of being the lesser important human. Those kinds of marital talks are never fun. They are exhausting, they sting, they go on forever and ever, but they're totally and completely necessary.
A week ago he went online and purchased a snore-guard. It can't be the most comfortable thing to wear all night long, but sweet Lord it is working! He still lightly snores, but it's tolerable – so tolerable. More importantly. I'm so grateful that this simple gesture of wearing his snore guard shows me that he does care about my comfort. It makes a world of difference in my sleep patterns and a world of difference in my appreciation for him.
Thank you, husband. Thank you for wearing your cumbersome mouth guard at night so that I can sleep and so that I know that you love me.
Fellows, if your wife tells you that you snore, then you snore. If you love your wife, if you value her and see her as equally important, buy yourself a snore guard. Nothing says I love you like a snore guard.
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