Wake up to the joy of separate bedrooms, Cameron Diaz urges couples

Hollywood aristocrat Cameron Diaz lends support to a movement that says it’s okay for people in relationships to sleep apart.

Cameron Diaz has been married to Benji Madden since 2015. Picture Montage: The Times

Explaining the sleeping arrangements of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip to a royal biographer, her cousin Lady Pamela Hicks said it was customary for upper-class couples to have separate bedrooms.

“You don’t want to be bothered with snoring or someone flinging a leg around,” she said. “Then when you are feeling cosy you share your room sometimes. It’s lovely to be able to choose.”

This custom has now received a powerful endorsement from one of the aristocrats of Hollywood. “You guys,” Cameron Diaz said, “we should totally normalise separate bedrooms.”

Diaz, 51, lent her support to what is sometimes called the “sleep divorce” movement in an appearance on the podcast Lipstick on the Rim, in which the presenters and guests discuss cosmetics while drinking.

The actor was promoting an organic wine company she had founded with her friend, the cosmetics tycoon Katherine Power. Power recalled a recent night when she had banished her husband from the bedroom for snoring.

One of the presenters interrupted, saying she did not sleep in the same bedroom as her partner. “I like to have my own space,” she said.

Diaz described separate bedrooms as akin to separate dwellings. “I have my house, you have yours,” she said. “We have the family house in the middle. I will go and sleep in my room. You go sleep in your room. I’m fine. And we have the bedroom in the middle that we can convene in for our relations.”

The actor said she would not want to live apart from her husband but it should be normal for couples to do so. Picture: EPA/The Times

The practice, somewhat easier to implement in a California mansion than in the average British home, has won the support of some sleep scientists, chiefly when one partner suffers from disruptive sleep patterns.

A study in 1969, looking at 14 married couples who went to bed on three consecutive nights in a sleep laboratory, found that people experienced deeper sleep when they slept alone than when with their partner. But the couples also reported being less satisfied with their sleep after a night alone.

Researchers reviewing a welter of more recent studies, in 2007, found that good sleep was associated with happier relationships and advised that “sleeping apart is not necessarily an indicator of an unhappy or unhealthy relationship”. Wendy Troxel, lead author of the study, told CNN that “couples can still make the bedroom a sacred space even if they choose not to sleep together.”

In a survey this year the National Sleep Foundation, a non-profit organisation devoted to slumber, found that only 1.4 per cent of respondents had taken this guidance and commenced a “sleep divorce” in the past year, though those who did reported sleeping slightly longer each night. Just over half felt that their sleep had improved.

A Roger Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech who has studied the history of sleep, said the presumption that couples would sleep together loosened among the upper classes during the 17th and 18th centuries. “Before the industrial revolution, it was common to have a bedmate and perhaps to sleep with your children as well. Beds are expensive, plus they take up room,” he said.

There was safety in numbers. “This was an era of witchcraft and demons and criminals breaking into your home,” he said. “On a more practical level, the warmth of another person was very important … In western Europe, in France in particular, they would bring livestock into their huts, to profit from their warmth.”

Occasionally, this practice has found modern adherents. The author Jay McInerney told The Times that his wife, Anne Hearst, kept several pigs, at least one of which would sleep with them. “She did have a pig that slept in the bed, which was not exactly an aphrodisiac,” McInerney said. “The pig was intrusive, to say the least. There’s nothing quite so painful as when you get a hoof in your general groin area in the middle of the night.”

Ekirch said that although some aristocratic couples began sleeping apart, from the 17th century, there remained incentives to stay together. “There was an expression, misogynistic in origin, of the ‘night lecture’,” he said. In bed, gender hierarchies broke down, and women were “able to take their husbands to task while in bed”.

Before acceding to the throne, Princess Elizabeth wrote to her mother that her new husband, Philip, was “terribly independent” and she wanted him to be “boss in his own home”, the biographer Sally Bedell Smith writes in Elizabeth the Queen. In their own home together for the first time, in 1949, “they had adjacent bedrooms, connected by a door, his with masculine panelling, hers a feminine pink and blue”, Smith writes.

Diaz did not describe her own arrangements so precisely. And after calling for the normalisation of separate bedrooms, she rather undercut her message by saying she had only wanted that arrangement before her marriage to Benji Madden, almost nine years ago.

“I don’t feel that way now because my husband is so wonderful,” she said.

The Times