We’re always being told some great new trick to improve our bedroom lives.
Eat this, do that, wake up early, wake up late, do Pilates, wear Glad wrap, wear heels in bed – the list goes on.
However, the newest research to come out of the world of intimate science is a tip of a very different kind. The key to spicing up your love life? Separate beds.
Don’t laugh – the science behind it is at least solid. Apparently romps are more satisfying, and ultimately more frequent, if you don’t share a bed with your significant other afterwards.
This actually makes sense, in a way.No coping with snoring, stealing covers, emissions in the night, disrupted sleep, nightmares – just your own bed?
It may feel adolescent, but scientists now allege that this is a very good way to keep your sex life as steamy as it was at the beginning of a relationship, where you did perhaps have separate beds – and, indeed, separate lives.
The idea of creeping into a lover’s bed, having a fling and then returning to your own bed may strike some people as eccentric, but it apparently heightens the excitement of the act, as it’s not a shared ‘ordinary’ space – the bed in which you thrash around, sweat, contemplate work or write your grant proposals. It’s all about the psychology.
Recalling the naughtiness of college hook-ups isn’t just a side-effect; it’s the ultimate aim. If you make love in a ‘new’ space every time, and then go back to your own bed, you’re reasserting your independence as sexual partners, and are able to get better sleep (which is always good for your libido).
Plus it has celebrity adherents. Monica Belluci and Vince Cassel have separate beds, and Helena Bonham Carter and her husband Tim Burton actually live in adjoining houses!
So perhaps those separate beds in demure old TV shows like I Love Lucy were onto something after all. However, this advice is probably not for women who derive a deep amount of pleasure from the act of actually sleeping with their partners.
Spooning can be a very intimate act which establishes the patterns of a relationship, and the sleepy talk before lights-out has been the bedrock of many intimate pairings.
If that’s one of the most pleasurable parts of your relationship, one partner getting up to wander off to another bed might feel like an interruption – or an abandonment.
So if you’re in the mood for a change and desperately want to feel twenty-two again, suggest this to your partner- but don’t use it as an excuse to play games.
Saying it’s too cold to get up or that you want them in YOUR bed this time because you went to theirs the past five is not going to make things steamier – just more fraught. Always be conscientious and you might just end up making a difference. Leave It To Beaver might have had it right after all.
Lady Friday xx
Taking the pillow talk out of the bedroom, every Friday….
