Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-10-15 - 9:45 a.m.

Couch-bound, 3 a.m.

I'm up. Why am I up?

I'm up because my boyfriend snores.

Okay, that's not strictly true. I'm up because I woke up, and then couldn't get back to sleep because my boyfriend snores. He's an Olympic snorer. Does it loud, in snorts and long sonorous drawings of the saw blade, then in gulps and gobbles and on into more long rips.

I've tried imitating it; it only makes me cough. How does he do it?

Either the vast majority of men snore, or I have some sort of radar for picking them out. I admit I don't have a statistically valid sample, but they've all done it to some extent. Some could be poked and persuaded to turn over; some simply stopped and started throughout the night. This man is a non-stop chainsaw session.

This makes it sound as though I've shared a bed with two hundred men; I haven't. But those that I have, snored. I'm not a slut. I'm just a snore-whore.

BF is a chronic and fairly severe asthmatic. We're lucky he can breathe at all in my dust-laden house. So it's not the sort of problem one can approach. It's just life. He can't help it. He sleeps, he snores. He snores, I don't always sleep. And so it goes.

Given my limited research, I would guess the majority of women out there are sleeping with their own personal leaf blowers.

BF is very defensive about his snoring. Again, I think this is standard. Men don't even like to admit they sleep. "I wasn't sleeping!" No, you were just resting there, with that string of drool hanging down to your chest. Ever had the urge to poke your husband at about 4 am - "Hey, you're sleeping!" "I was NOT!" What's that about? It must be unmanly to sleep. Cave lions could come eat up the whole family or something. So if you can't admit you sleep, you certainly can't admit you were snoring like a two-stroke engine, advertising your whereabouts to cave lions within a forty-mile radius. I can see that.

He doesn't want to discuss his snoring, and I feel guilty bringing it up, like it was some personality defect he could work through if he only had enough therapy. I keep remembering the Dear Abby column I read as a teenager, where she said that you should take the snoring as a charming reminder that you HAVE a husband. I hate Dear Abby. I bet she snores herself. So - snoring is not supposed to bother me. I am supposed to think, "How sweet; this way, I can never forget that my loved one is here." Real Men don't snore and Real Women don't mind that they do.

Jeeeesus, we have some weird customs.

So I join the millions of women doing SleepRace 2000 at night. Can I make it under before the first orchestral movement starts? Hurrying to sleep doesn't really work, you know. You can't squinch up your eyes and just will yourself into deaf oblivion. Still, we know that if we fall asleep first, the snoring will probably not WAKE us; if HE falls asleep first, kiss it off, sister, it's the couch for us.

Of course, the couch is a problem, because then HE feels bad about having chased me out of my bed, and I feel bad because I made HIM feel bad, so I go back to bed and we start all over again.

I know I've said my piece about men and women and separate ends of the compound to live in. Now I'm adding in some soundproofing.

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