Justice for the Single Bed

Near the end of my summer vacation with a close friend in Nova Scotia, I climbed the wooden staircase of a Victorian bed-and-breakfast on Cape Breton Island, exhausted in a good way. A few steps ahead, the B&B owner unlocked the door to our home for the next three days: a large, antique-filled chamber anchored by a stately king-size bed and, off the far wall, a slim, step-down room just wide enough for a single.

"Where do you want to sleep?" my friend asked.

"The single," I answered, no hesitation.

It wasn’t just the privacy the small bed in its own little section of the room promised. Nor did my friend and I know yet that in a different suite across the hall, an attempted murder had occurred many years earlier. (It was a poisoning, of all things, ending with the poisoner—a 77-year-old woman—in jail, the poisoned—her new husband—in the hospital, and our B&B owner a reluctant regional celebrity.) While the bed I coveted was comfortably far from the scene of that crime, what really drew me to the modest single with one flat pillow and a soft, handmade quilt was its lack of drama. It beckoned like a 38-by-75-inch raft tethered to the busy ship that was our vacation.

A single bed draws a dotted line back in time to childhood, when sleep came quickly and completely. As a girl, I shared a room with one of my sisters. We had twin beds—two singles—arranged side by side, with enough distance between them for us to feel alone together. Our blue shag carpet sometimes doubled as a body of water, our beds as vessels. By high school I had inherited a full-size bed from my parents, but soon it was back to a narrow single bed in college, where I managed to sleep, sit, eat, study, entertain, and, occasionally, copulate. I slept quite well those four years.

As an adult, though, the single bed floats away from your purview. My husband and I live in the suburbs of Houston, where homes and bedrooms run large, like everything else in Texas. We sleep in a queen-size bed, but many couples we know have king beds so fancy that one partner cannot feel the other slide in or out. One of our favorite couples sleeps in a king so far off the ground I’m not quite sure how they climb in. I like to imagine them as gymnasts at bedtime, raising one arm and then running from a great distance to vault themselves onto their elevated landing mat, where a tasteful nest of black and white throw pillows awaits. Of course, my single adult friends—some of the happiest people I know—don’t sleep in single beds, either. Whether you’re partnered or not, the single bed tends to be something we wave goodbye to after childhood, its compact footprint outgrown.

The 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary I keep in my home library says the word "bed" likely originates from an old Indo-European/Indo-Germanic word meaning "to dig," a bed being "a dug-out place" or a "lair" for humans or beasts. No throw pillows there.

The road from dirt to duvet covers has been long and crowded. For eons, humans bedded down in groups to stay warm, sleeping in the same space with family and other household members. Right up into the 19th century in America and Europe, travelers bunked in the same bed with people they didn’t know, though there’s literary evidence that this was nobody’s preference. Early on in the 1850s novel Moby Dick, for example, Ishmael contemplates sharing a bed with Queequeg at the Spouter-Inn: "No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother.… And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, and that stranger is a harpooner, then your objections indefinitely multiply." Can you imagine spooning a harpooner at the Holiday Inn Express in 2023? There’d be so much to talk about at the breakfast buffet!

No matter what size bed you land in, sleeping alone is something of a luxury. In an era when "sleep divorce" is a thing, even some perfectly happy partners in the day are adopting a version of consciously uncoupling at night. This doesn’t mean giving up on sex in your marriage. It means scheduling a meetup in your own home! And when you’re done, one of you slinks away and the other doesn’t care! It’s magic!

But I like sleeping beside my husband. I married so late in life that I still wake most mornings amazed that I found someone willing to love me and leave me alone—my two basic requirements, not always in that order. That doesn’t mean, though, that I always stay in our bed. My husband snores, and the breathing strip he sticks to the bridge of his nose each night cuts back on most of the noise, but not all. We also share our bed with Leo and Phoebe, a dynamic brother-sister cat duo who are our constant companions over and under the covers. Sometimes, that’s more noise and fur than I’m looking for.

Also, I never sleep through the night. I tend to doze off around 10 p.m., wake for an hour or so around 2 a.m., and then fall back asleep until morning. The history around biphasic sleep suggests this pattern may well have been scripted into my DNA during the Middle Ages, when it was considered normal to enjoy two separate sleep phases each night. I imagine my medieval ancestors—peasants, for sure—hitting the literal hay after dark, rising in the wee hours to gossip, drink, or pillage, and then going back to sleep until sunrise. If they’d had cell phones, I’m sure they’d be playing Wordle in the middle of the night, like me. After they got back from pillaging.

On the nights I feel compelled to get up before my second sleep, I’ll tiptoe upstairs to our guest room. This spare room is my occasional sanctuary, a pristine retreat from the pets, the chores, and my cluttered home office. It’s also spare in decor, outfitted with twin beds and not much else. When I slip into the single tucked in the near corner, I can feel the errant scribbles of my day starting to disappear, like a messy draft righting itself for a clean read in the morning.

A single bed is oddly intimate, restricting you even as it encourages you to spread out. Your body is the sole focus, the only subject in an open-air frame. And the act of fully occupying that area, of experiencing an acute sense of your own proportion, is what I find so soothing. If a single bed could speak, it would whisper: You. You are enough.

Top photo by Tony Luong of architect Kyu Sung Woo in his Massachusetts home; originally published in "Natural Fit" from Dwell’s September/October 2021 issue

Related Reading:

The TikTok Girlies Reclaiming Being a "Bed Person"

When Did Bunk Beds Become Childhood Status Symbols?