Marrying Your Sweetheart: Beds and Attachment Dating

As I've said, my honey and I have been together for 8 and a half years. Looking back on our past, you can trace the progression of our relationship through the beds we've shared together. When we first started dating we saw each other sporadically. After we became a couple, while I was in high school, we would see each other on Tuesday nights and over the weekends. I used to have late start on Wednesday mornings so my honey would spend the night on a blow up mattress next to the full size bed my grandma gave me and hang out a bit in the mornings. After my first year of college in the dorms where we occasionally tried to squish onto the extra long lofted twin, we moved in together, living like vagabonds a couple years here and a couple there. First we shared my honey's bed from his high school years, then a futon from when his dad was in college in a room that was ours instead of just his. At my mom's house it was a futon from a friend that my honey and our best friend broke when they jumped on it in my old bedroom. Finally, the room was redone and we got a bed that was ours.

Through this time I think I can count on my fingers, maybe my toes, the number of nights we've spent apart. We never intended to be "that" couple, the one that's always together and mushy mushy gag. The stars just kind of aligned and it happened. A few days in Oregon visiting family. A few days in Santa Cruz after we had our biggest and most difficult fight. A night apart for my friend's girls only pre-wedding party. Somehow, no matter what happens, at the end of the day we end up in the same bed. It's like we've been sleeping in the same bed for so long that it's become a "thing" and now it seems silly and wrong to break it. We may have never intended it to happen but we definitely go out of our way now to make sure it stays that way now, after so many years how can we not? After all the futons and dorm beds, our bed is big, comfy and red with too many pillows and an oversized down comforter. Sleeping on it is like sinking into a cloud and it makes me feel home, or at least as home as we can be before we're in our own home.

I know it's not always practical to be joined at the hip as my mom accuses us of being, but it's what's natural for us. We feel most right coming together at night, even if it means crawling into bed at 3am exhausted just so we can sleep next to each other. Mornings when I wake up and he's already gone would bum me out except there's usually a kitty there in his spot looking for a cuddle. Since our beds and homes have been kind of inconsistent, we have really made our home in each other. That sounds sappy but no matter what arguments we have, come morning we always end up with our oversized comforter skewed, legs tangled and pillows squished up against the wall. When we go on road trips we travel like gypsies with a big red back up quilt and tons of pillows.

When we finally move out I'm sure our bed will be transformed again. We have a full sized bed frame in our garage that matches our antique bedroom set that needs to be adjusted to fit our queen sized bed. We've had our beloved red bedding since I started college, replaced once with the same set again. If our wedding registry is followed we'll be upgrading to a more sophisticated version of the big red bed, one that will hopefully represent a new chapter in our life together. I just hope that no matter where we go or what bed we sleep in we continue to spend our nights together fighting over the blankets, and that we never have to spend more than a few nights apart.