Sleep.

If you pay any attention to my FB status updates, a good 90% of them are complaining about my messed up sleep schedule. Sorry about that. But as I got to thinking about how to correct it, I started thinking about how all this is affecting our relationship, and how it's affected us in the past.

Sleep, in general, has always been an issue for me. Likewise, it's consistently been an issue for us.

For myself, sleep is very important. However, I've put it on such a high pedestal that I've actually refused to do anything on lack of sleep. Amazingly, I never lost a job because of the excuses I would make to get all the sleep I thought I needed in order to function (rather than just plowing through the day tired), but it has definitely gotten in the way of college classes. I obviously know that I have the ability to force myself to function through a day without much sleep -- somehow I survived our wedding day -- but I tend to allow my strong preference to do otherwise take precedence.

I suppose the reason I put so much into sleep is that I've rarely had a good experience with sleep, and I know that a good night's sleep really is quite important. For as long as I can remember, it's always been difficult for me to even fall asleep in the first place. My mind just won't shut off, so I'm left lying in bed for at least 2hrs before I finally manage to drift off. I feel like I spend a lot of my sleep time in REM, as I have a large number of dreams that I remember, and I almost always have at least one dream that I remember during any sleep session. Rarely do I wake up feeling alert or refreshed. Often, my sleep gets interrupted, which just irritates me because, unless I'm ridiculously tired, it will then take me another hour or so to fall back asleep.

Yubo doesn't seem to care about sleep as much as I do. Or actually, he cares about it when I think he shouldn't so much, and vice versa. He likes to call himself a night owl. He's told me before that he doesn't like the feeling of "missing out" when he's sleeping. He'll usually put off sleep for as long as possible playing a game or watching his favorite television series, even when he needs to up early the next morning. If left to himself, he'll stay up until about 3 or 4 in the morning, even though he has to wake up at 7 or 8. He doesn't like to tell me when he needs to wake up (especially if it's earlier than usual) because he knows that I will try to get him to sleep earlier. Because I think it's so important, I usually find myself mothering him when it comes to getting to bed at a decent time in order to get enough sleep.

He feels that he can always make up for lost sleep later. Not quite, "I'll sleep when I'm dead," but almost. When it's his day off, he will gladly sleep in until afternoon... even though we've agreed to run errands or something that day. That's when I think he cares too much about sleeping, when it really should be the rest of the work week. To compensate, he loads up on energy drinks to try and keep himself awake, when really all he had to do was not start that last quest, go to bed, and get a full night's sleep.

Now you put the two of us together, and it's a horrible mess. It's like we're complete opposites in all aspects, and there's no benefit to be found in this difference.

I'm generally a light sleeper, and I figure that's why it's so easy for my sleep to be interrupted. He sleeps like a rock within a minute. He can easily fall asleep in the middle of his own sentence. This is troublesome when I have nightmares (and thankfully I don't have many at all anymore), because I can't wake him up at all to get any comfort. Not just looking at nightmares, but I feel if an emergency happened in the middle of the night, I fear that he wouldn't wake up for me. That doesn't give me a safe feeling at all. Two major incidences of this problem are my demon attack after my baptism (I ended up having to run to the bedroom and wake up his mom), and a horrible nightmare where I was too scared to make a noise and shaking him did nothing (I ended up texting my sister in hopes that she would be awake, but still ended up left on my own that night).

He grew up sleeping next to train tracks, so he can sleep through pretty much everything. This causes him to blast his alarm, and still not wake up to it. He's let his alarm go off for 30min without budging. It's kind of a toss up whether he'll actually wake up to his alarm or not. Mostly, he'll wake up enough to put it on sleep, and do that about 15 times. (I'm exaggerating, but not by much.) Obviously, since we don't have to wake up at the same time, it interrupts my sleep. So then I get really cranky with him.

Because he loads himself on sugar and caffeine during the day, his body stays very restless at night even though he's knocked out. This causes him to fuss often throughout the night. The most annoying thing he does is kick the bed. He will lift his leg up off the mattress a good 6inches, and then let it drop. And he does this a couple of times before his body gets tired enough to stop.

So all these things make it very difficult for me to sleep with him. I've read all over that a good way to sleep is to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Impossible with him. I've asked him if he would try to help me by setting a sleep schedule with me. The last time we tried was before we were engaged, and it lasted a day or two.

I can't sleep before him because whatever it is he's doing (playing a game, watching tv) keeps me awake. This is a combination of me being rather sensitive to these things, and him being deaf.

To clarify a bit: When I am watching tv in the afternoon, I will have the volume set at 25. As the day progresses and gets darker, as long as nothing else is running (dishwasher, washing machine, etc) I am more comfortable watching tv at 15-20. Yubo will play or watch with the volume at least set to 30, even with nothing else going on and when it's midnight with no other sounds to compete with other than the gurgling of the cat water fountain. Often he'll be at 32-35. So I really do think that his hearing is generally bad. He's grown up in a house very close to train tracks, he sets his alarm at full blast and keeps it right next to his head, and he's the kind that you can hear what he's listening to when he uses headphones.

If I do manage to fall asleep through that, I wake up when he comes to bed. The actual Tempur-pedic mattress may not transfer movement, but the sheets sure do. And the rustling of comforters/blankets can wake me as well. We don't share a blanket -- it would be worse if we did.

All of these things lead me to the conclusion that we may need to be one of those couples that sleeps separately. I find I sleep better on the couch, or when he's already left for work. In other words, I sleep better without him.

The problem is that I don't like it at all. I want to be able to sleep with him in the same bed. Actually, I'm the type that would like to go to bed and wake up together -- this is something that causes me a bit of pain because he doesn't care to do this with me. I have yet to figure out why this is actually quite important to me. I suspect it has something to do with intimacy and building a deeper bond with each other. I get frustrated when we actually do go to bed at the same time and he falls asleep so quickly without staying up for even a few minutes of "pillow talk." I feel like he doesn't take any time to be aware of our being in bed together, and I guess that makes me feel... less important somehow. There was a time when he would kiss me on the cheek before leaving for work, and I would usually feign sleep because I thought it was very sweet and romantic. Now he leaves without a work or gesture. I suppose it's because he doesn't want to wake me, even though I've told him countless times that I will most likely be awake when he is because of his darn alarm. But still, he leaves me be, and I can't help but feel a little abandoned. I may have to follow the cats -- be wide awake and rub up against his legs in order to get any attention. Ah... but he gives them affection when they're sleeping too. I guess I just needed to be a cat. LoL.

Anyhow... I wonder what can be done about this. I've talked to him many times about sleep, but he still wants to maintain his lifestyle. I don't want to nag him, but I can't resolve this on my own. If I could just fall asleep like he does, this wouldn't be a problem. But I do fear that this is something that is slowly but steadily chipping away at our relationship. This really is one of the bad things to have gotten amplified after marriage. I really hope this will work out.