Dear Josh:

Welcome! Indeed it is an odd thing. As I read classic literature, I notice that for most of human history, no such obsession with room-sharing existed. Perfectly normal and happy couples had separate rooms, or even separate wings of whole castles. It's understood that the poor had to share rooms due to their poverty, but it was almost never insinuated that there was some final romantic virtue to room-sharing.

Every so often, when the main stream media runs a show on it, it turns out frequently that separate-room or separate-bed couples reported feeling consistently more romantic, since physical togetherness was a choice and not a forced and automatic thing.

I hope people will spread the word about this tribe. What's funny is, when I had a great relationship with a woman in a separate-rooms arrangement, couples would visit us and say we were not in love, but then those couples would often break up and we would still be together years later. And still others came and saw our arrangement and thought, "Yeah, why not? Maybe we should try that?"

And then other couples just complain of how one snores, the other hogs covers, one needs the room hot, another needs it cold, the one has allergies and is sneezing, the other has to pee four times a night and is waking the other up, one is tossing and turning or bumping into the other just as they are about to fall asleep. And yet, they suffer every day and get no rest and endure all this stress because they still believe that a separate beds arrangement would be an admission of not really being in love.

Frankly, I've come to believe that the shared-beds thing, when one partner demands it absolutely, must be a kind of codependency.