Tuesday, July 03, 2012

No Rest For The Weary

I wrote last year right before the wedding about how hard it was to deal with a situation where my fiancee thought I was disturbing her sleep while masturbating and I knew that I wasn't masturbating, but rather I always moved around and made noises while I slept because I had undiagnosed sleep apnea.  I got a CPAP machine, which forces oxygen into my body through my nose while I sleep, and I thought all would be well.  It's not.

I still move during sleep, although not nearly as much as before, but we're both big people and it's only a queen-size bed, so I'm still adversely affecting the wife's sleep.  Last night, she woke me a couple of times by kicking me in the leg, and she also poked me in the back to tell me that my oxygen mask was making noises, meaning it had slipped into a position where air was leaking out.  She explained this morning that she kicked me because I had unknowingly kicked her several times, which I do every night according to her, and she apologized for getting so frustrated that she kicked back.  I have to understand her sentiment, though; if someone kicked me in my sleep, I'd have a nasty reaction, too.

But the issue is, I'm still doing things in my sleep that disturb my wife, and she's very discouraged by it all, and so am I.  I try very hard to not move or even touch my wife while asleep, but once I fall into slumber, I'm completely unaware of my actions.  The only moving I do when awake is shifting my weight or turning over, and that's only because my lower back gets stiff if I'm in the same position for too long.  It's maddening to know that I'm always disrupting my wife's sleep pattern, and I'm sure she'd describe it as something more severe while using more colorful language.  But what the fuck do we do?  I don't want to sleep in separate beds, and neither does she, but there have been several nights during our short marriage where she's asked me to take my CPAP machine into the spare bedroom and catch some zzzs in there.  She's tried to be diplomatic about it, but it's still a terrible feeling, kinda like when the dog messes in a part of the house that's valuable to the owner and the owner banishes the pet somewhere else.  But that's where we stand right now.  She tolerates me sleeping in the bed until she can't take it any more, then I have to sleep in the smaller bed for a night or two.  And this is only less than a year of marriage.  I'm legit scared of how she's going to feel about it after a few years of this shit.

We've got other issues, like every married couple, but this one confronts us every night and (in her case) threatens to ruin every day before it even starts.  It breaks my heart.  I do not want to sleep apart from my wife, but I don't know what to do to stop disturbing her when we sleep together.  At least she's backed off a little from accusing me of masturbating next to her, although I get the feeling she still thinks that's what I was doing.  I had to concede the point that I can't tell her 100% that I wasn't masturbating if I also simultaneously don't know what I do while I'm asleep.  It's true that I don't know what I'm doing while I'm asleep.  It's just that there are a million little context clues that should be there if I am jacking myself in my sleep, such as waking up with my whang out, or with my pajamas off, or with semen present somewhere in my shorts, but none of those clues have ever presented themselves to me.  The finances, the intimacy, the communication--any other situation in the marriage takes up our time for a little while and then dies down, but this sleep thing persists, every single night, with no end in sight.  We are at a standstill, and I don't know what to do about it.