According to a new study, the old saying should go, “happy wife, happy night life.” Research shows that a woman’s satisfaction in her relationship is revealed through how well a couple sleeps together.
Lead author and researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, Heather Gunn, has been studying sleep through a different lens. “Most of what is known about sleep comes from studying it at the individual level; however, for most adults, sleep is a shared behaviour between bed partners,” said Gunn. Her findings show that “how couples sleep together may influence and be influenced by their relationship functioning.”
The synchronicity of partners’ sleep — how much time they spend awake or asleep together — is likely linked to the satisfaction of the female partner within the relationship. Contrarily, how a man feels about the relationship doesn’t appear to affect either’s sleeping patterns.
The study involved 46 different heterosexual married couples. Their sleep was monitored over a period of ten days, then all were asked to evaluate their relationships.
Results showed that, in general, couples were awake or asleep at the same time for 75 per cent of the night. This percentage was higher when the wives reported higher levels of satisfaction with their marriage.
“The sleep of married couples is more in sync on a minute-by-minute basis than the sleep of random individuals,” said Gunn. She continued, “This suggests that our sleep patterns are regulated not only by when we sleep, but also by with whom we sleep.”
An assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, Wendy Troxel, conducted a different study showing that the presence of a partner improved quality of sleep for women.
Troxel went on to investigate how a poor night’s sleep on the wife’s part could result in issues for the couple. “We found that wives’ sleep problems affect her own and her spouse’s marital functioning the next day, [. . .] Specifically, wives who took longer to fall asleep the night before reported poorer marital functioning the next day, and so did their husbands.”
Their collective findings give a whole new meaning to waking up on the right side of the bed.
