Is three bedrooms the new two bathrooms?
Forget separate bathrooms... could the key to marital harmony be a room of one’s own – and one for sharing, asks Rosa Silverman
‘A perfect expression of the idea that sleep should be all you do in your own bedroom’
What is the secret to a successful marriage? Don’t worry if you don’t know the answer – it is one of those $64,000 questions over which humanity is destined to forever chew (or at least until such a time that monogamy is abandoned altogether).
As such, many a stab has been made to resolve it: from a shared sense of humour to a willingness to forgive, experts have long pontificated on how to make it through life without murdering the person you promised to love until death did you part.
In recent years, the debate has zeroed in on the need for personal space – in a literal sense. First, it was bathrooms, with the likes of Sir Michael Caine stressing the importance of his ‘n’ hers washrooms to the preservation of good marital relations. “You never share a bathroom with your wife,” the actor told an interviewer in 2014, imparting wisdom acquired during four decades of marriage to Shakira, his second wife.
Then beds – and bedrooms, specifically – became the new focus of the debate. One in six couples say they sleep in separate beds, with differing bedtime habits and snoring among the reasons given. The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh are understood to be among those who sleep separately.
“In England,” Lady Pamela Hicks, the Queen’s cousin, was quoted as saying in one royal biography, “the upper class always have had separate bedrooms. You don’t want to be bothered with snoring or someone flinging a leg around. Then when you are feeling cosy, you share your room sometimes. It is lovely to be able to choose.”
Now, if reports are to be believed, the Prince of Wales has taken the concept to new heights.
A friend of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall told a newspaper this week that the secret to the couple’s happy marriage is not just each having their own bedroom, but the existence of a third marital chamber with a double bed “that they can use whenever they like”.
This arrangement, which reportedly exists at Clarence House, their London residence, apparently “suits them perfectly”. As well it might – for it sounds so wonderfully civilised.
“His Royal Highness has a room with a double bed, decorated to his own taste, then Camilla has her own room with a double bed, decorated just the way she likes it,” the friend reported.
And we have to admit, it all sounds very tempting: never tripping over someone else’s discarded clothing; never being woken by someone else’s alarm clock; never worrying about disturbing someone else should you want to read your book until gone midnight. Never mind that this someone else is the love of your life: boundaries, in any successful relationship, matter.
So could the three-bedroom set-up be the key to marital bliss?
Kate Figes, who writes about family life, is dismissive of the idea. “I’m sure that for anyone who could have three bedrooms in this day and age, of course it’s going to make for a happy marriage because they’re going to have more space,” she says.
But she points out that, in reality, most couples will not have the luxury of being able to set aside three separate bedrooms for themselves – not least because even those whose children have flown the nest will frequently have grown-up offspring returning.
Meanwhile, Dr Neil Stanley, an independent sleep expert, is all for it, hailing it as the “perfect solution” to our slumber problems. Indeed, the practice of couples sharing the same double bed in the same bedroom all night, every night, is a relatively modern one, he notes. Previously only those too poor to afford separate rooms would do so, and since it became the norm, our sleep has undoubtedly suffered.
“Much of our sleep disturbance at night is caused by our bed partner, and anything that disturbs your sleep is not a good thing,” he explains. “So having separate bedrooms is going to be essential to your sleep if your partner disturbs you.”
While some advocates of bed-sharing may see any deviation from this pattern as indicative of a problem in the marriage, Dr Stanley explains that it is anything but.
“It’s a modern misconception that sleep is anything to do with intimacy,” he goes on. “Sleeping separately is a very pragmatic response [to the need to get a good night’s rest]. People are being conned into believing that they have to share a bed for the sake of their marriage.”
The advantage of setting aside a third bedroom for conjugal relations, he adds, is that the other two bedrooms are then reserved solely for sleep, which again is conducive to some solid shut-eye.
The set-up, he believes, is “the perfect expression of the idea that sleep should be all you do in your own bedroom”.
Nor is the concept anything new. “In Victorian times, the idea of having a bed where you had conjugal nights was talked about,” says Dr Stanley. “Having a physical separation between sleep and intimacy, a little rendezvous area where both of you know what’s going to happen, is quite sexy. It almost sounds more fun.”
Gurpreet Singh, a Relate couples counsellor, isn’t quite so enthusiastic. “It’s a killer to spontaneity, if you ask me,” he says. “It kills some of the charm.
“But you have to look at the reasons why someone might do this. If it works, then great. But if it’s only reserved for intimacy, that does sound a bit odd for a relationship because as you get older the sex tends to dwindle off.”
Aside from what happens when the marital suite sits awkwardly unoccupied for increasingly lengthy stretches, the three-bedroom arrangement throws up a number of other questions. Does lovemaking have to be scheduled? Is the room unused the rest of the time, or can you stick guests in there and not tell them its true purpose? And perhaps most pressing of all, what does one call it?
“I’ll see you in the third bedroom, darling” just doesn’t sound all that romantic. The conjugal suite? The love lair? The sex room? The chamber of lust? All have the allure of a cheap erotic paperback, and it is hard to imagine Britons using any such name without either a teenage smirk or a heavy dose of irony.
Still, as Singh says, the Charles-and-camilla system allows you “a little space to do what you want to do”. If anything is key to a long and healthy marriage, that, at least, sounds like it might just be the answer.