The Last Night I Slept With My Husband

Exactly six months ago, my husband and I put our two sons to bed at night as usual.

Together we paced through the choreography we’ve perfected over hundreds of evenings in our home. I ran the bath. He raced my sons up the stairs. I toweled off my youngest. He helped our older son pick out a book from the pile next to his bed.

I ran through the motions of our evening routine without lingering on the inherent sadness of it all. Neither of us mentioned anything about all of these last moments together.

That night, long after our boys had fallen asleep, my husband crawled into the bed we had shared for ten years. I’d already turned off the lights and turned my back to him toward my side of the bed. But I felt his presence near me as we slept side-by-side for the last time.

That night would be the last night we slept in this way, so close and yet so far apart. Our marriage was over. The next day, we would move into a new apartment that we would share, alternating staying in the house with our kids and living this new single life in a trendy apartment building with a gym and movie theater.

We had decided months before that night to end our marriage.

It was a slow disintegration, one that had left me feeling hollowed out for years. By the time we reached an actual decision and began working through the details of our separation, most of the initial sadness had worn away.

We both felt ready. But we barely talked about it anymore as we approached our final days of living together in one house. And we certainly didn’t discuss what it would feel like to spend our last night together in the same bed.

Over the years, you see, the act of sleeping next to each other had long lost its luster. Our queen bed had become nothing more than a convenience.

Somewhere in my far distant memory were the evenings we would stay up late talking, or the slow mornings waking up next to each other’s warm bodies.

I can still picture some of the beds we shared around the world: the bed we shared on Christmas morning in a Dubrovnik hostel after a snowstorm; the rickety bed in the attic in Pennsylvania where we slept after countless family gatherings; the sleeping bags in Northern India where we huddled for warmth; and the hotel room bed in Medellin where we made passionate love after I found out he had had an affair with a mutual friend. All of these beds over the years represented our shared energy as young lovers.

But our bed in our married home was no longer that kind of shared space.

In fact, we had not had marital relations in over a year. And it was not even in this bed together. We had attempted a weekend away to rekindle things, after years of therapy and even more years of a sexless marriage. There was a spark there in that hotel room two hours from home. But the moment we returned to our house and the life we’d built together, the spark went out and never returned.

And yet in that final night together in our marital bed, I was struck by how much something that had lost nearly all symbolic meaning — the act of sleeping next to each other — could suddenly feel momentous.

When drafting the separation agreement during mediation, our lawyer told us that our agreement was valid once written as long as we didn’t have sex and/or sleep in the same bed. It didn’t surprise me that legal rules surrounding a marriage could rest on something so arbitrary; so much of legal marriage seemed archaic in that way.

But I couldn’t help but chuckle at our separation hinging on this act. Had our marriage still been a marriage despite our lack of sex and intimacy? Then surely a separation could still be a separation even with it?

We never tested this logic, of course. There was no question that we would maintain this arbitrary rule for the validity of our separation agreement.

So it remained valid, and we separated.

And, like so much that I’ve learned about separation and divorce, our shared bed became one other piece of our post-marriage life that seems so familiar and yet so different from what it was.

In our nesting arrangement, in which we share a 2-bedroom apartment and our family home and alternate living in each, we still share this bed that we shared for over 10 years as a married couple. Our bodies press against the same mattress, and our heads against the same pillows. But we don’t share it at the same time.

When I crawl into the bed at night when I’m with the kids in our home, it gives me a bit of comfort to know that his body was there the night before. There is a safety to it, a familiarity that makes all of these changes a tiny bit more bearable.

I am not sure how much longer we will continue this nesting arrangement, or how much longer we will alternate sleeping alone in a bed we once shared. But we are learning as we go. We are charting new territory as co-parents who no longer share a bed but who will forever share the two boys we love more than anything else.