HitchDied

The Secret to a Successful Marriage

| 21 Comments

Want your marriage to last the harsh winter like a squirrel’s acorn supply?  It’s quite simple: you need two comforters.

Of all the challenges in sharing a bed with my husband—our very different sleep schedules, his night terrors, my teeth grinding—the greatest is that he is a notorious covers thief.

Last night I made the bed with Collin already in it; perfectly even, well tucked-in.  I slipped in alongside him and began reading him a bedtime story (the first two chapters of Mindy Kaling’s book, which is wonderful so far).  We hadn’t even finished the preface before I felt a chill, looked down, and saw the covers had shifted dramatically to Collin’s side of the bed, leaving half my body with only a top sheet between me and our icy bedroom air.  Even when he’s AWAKE he steals the covers.

The only solution is to have a second comforter waiting for me at the foot of the bed to replace the one that Collin will inevitably yank away to create his little bed burrito. It’s not a perfect fix—I’d much rather share trapped  body heat, and the bulk of two comforters can create an awkward barrier that makes spooning much less satisfying.  But it keeps me from waking up ten times every night to try to reclaim stolen blanket coverage so I can stop feeling like I’m sleeping in someone’s backyard in Saskatchewan, and  thereby, saves my marriage.

Do you sleep with a covers thief? Do you have a better solution [Spritzing the thief with water like a misbehaving kitty? Stapling the blanket to either side of the bed? Turning up the thermostat to create a reasonable indoor temperature? (Hahahahaha! Just kidding about that last one.)] than our one-comforter-per-person strategy?

21 Comments

  1. I’m the covers thief in our house. But Tony pushes then off anyway, so it’s not really a problem for us. So I guess my solution was to marry someone who doesn’t like covers. That’s not really a helpful solution, I know.

  2. We also have 2 comforters. We are both covers thieves!

  3. I’m sort of a blanket stealer. But I’m also the cuddler. We’re definitely share the body heat sort of people in the winter. And in the summer I get shoved away with a “You’re hot. Both types. Now go away.”

  4. I may have to investigate this solution. After I got out of bed this morning, I walked around to the other side and noted that 50% of the comforter was hanging off that side. That 50% should be mine!!! My solutions thus far has been pre-emptive burrito-ing (we refer to this behavior also as “cocooning”) prior to falling asleep but sadly my unconscious covers defense cannot come close to matching his unconscious covers thievery.

  5. J is just a bed wrecker. Seriously, he sleeps diagonally across the bed, alternately rips the covers away from me or tosses them off himself so vigorously that they end up on the floor on my side of the bed. He has even rolled himself into the covers once or twice – I’m sort of impressed at the talent required for that. I’ve just gotten firm about handling it during the night – he doesn’t really wake up, but I’ll just tug until I get blankets back. Since he doesn’t remember it ever happening, we’re golden. (That is, until he decides to cuddle in his sleep – I prefer sleeping completely by myself, so I end up flailing in my sleep and hitting him. Oops?)

  6. I’m the blanket thief in our relationship, but J refuses to use a separate comforter (“It’s practically like separate beds!”) so we just tug-of-war.

  7. My husband is whatever the opposite of a covers thief (a covers charity?). When I wake up in the middle of a winter night to him shivering under just a sheet, I have to tuck him back in under the comforter.

    I’ve learned to sleep on an outside corner of the blankets, so at least when he pushes them off he’s forced to push them in my direction instead of off the other side of the bed where they don’t do either of us any good. Our different sleep styles have caused some major fights, which he may or may not be aware of, since he was asleep for most of them. It doesn’t help that I’m a Princess and the Pea sleeper who must have my entire body under the same amount of covers with no bunching at all times (and no drafts) to sleep.

  8. I married a covers charity (well, am marrying in nine days) and alternate between covers thievery and covers charity. When we wake up in the morning, there is often a giant wall of covers between us. (Which I honestly don’t mind. Bizarrely, even though I am the touch-needy person in the relationship, YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO TOUCH ME WHILE I SLEEP. EVEN IF YOU ARE MY HUSBAND. He is such a non-touch person in the normal course of things that it’s funny to me that he’s the one who moved his pillow to the middle of the bed so he can sleep near me, and he’s the one who cuddles ’til I shove him away and then cuddles again when we wake up in the morning.)

  9. We have a kingsize duvet (for a tiny bed) but I still manage to snuggle into all of it which makes him come over to snuggle me (which drives me crazy!)

    Why is he always so hot!?!!

    There is no solution!

  10. Oh oh, I am the blanket stealer … still when I realize what I did I try to cover the boy to restablish the balance if he does not do it before. And cuddling helps with the warmth too. Two blankets is just too messy for us, we had to do it for a while because I did not have a duvet, but a pile of blankets and it was just a big impossible tangle.

  11. Finally! I’m not alone, it’s true! People look at us like we have four heads when we say that we’ve used separate bedding every night since we moved in together but I swear by it. Neither of us are really cover thieves, we just like different sleeping conditions. He likes to be insanely warm, wrapped up tightly.. and I’m the exact opposite. We can still cuddle but when it comes to sleep time, having a little separation is fine. Honestly, I don’t know how people share a blanket. Crazies.

  12. One thing I should note is that although Tony doesn’t steal covers, he will steal pillows on occasion. More than once he has stolen the pillow right from under my head, in his sleep. Usually I just yank it back grumpily. One night I yelled at him after waking up to my head thunking down onto the bed. He apologized, but didn’t wake up enough to remember it in the morning. Since then he hasn’t done it.

  13. my stupid dogs are blanket thieves. we try to keep them from sleeping with us, but they ninja sneak onto the comforter sometime in the middle of the night and I wake up freezing because there is 70 lbs of dog pinning the comforter where it is, just shy of covering 1/2 my body.

  14. Tony overheats, but instead of throwing the blankets my direction, he kicks them down and off the bed, so I ned up curling against him for warmth (he’s like a big hybernating bear), and then he complains that I smoosh him into a tiny sliver of the bed and take the whole bed, but the empty part is COLD … because he kicked the blankets off.

    He complains that I steal pillows. I complain that he piles the pillows so high that it hurts my neck when I am trying to snuggle, which I have to do to stay warm because he stole the covers. Now that he’s gone during the week, I’ve been wearing socks to bed, which I apparently kick off during the night because when we stripped the bed last weekend to wash the sheets there were like 6 pair of socks at the end of the bed.

    So … nobody’s perfect?

  15. Our solution is a king-sized duvet for a queen sized bed. The extra length/weight seems to keep things pretty evenly spaced between our equal thievery, but if you already have that size then I think you’re up a cold creek without a blanket, as it were.

  16. DUDE. Since my bedroom suffers from arctic levels of cold and we don’t believe (can’t afford, same dif) to crank the heat I bought an electric underblanket. Best thing ever. You could get one for your half of the bed so you will have compensation for loss of shared body heat.

  17. We both accuse the other of being a cover hog. Since Collin is such a sound sleeper, I yank the covers back to my side of the bed. But I WILL admit to sleeping diagonally and apparently doing a tablecloth-under-all-the-dishes move wherein the top sheet comes undone at the bottom while the coverlet and the comforter are still firmly tucked in. This is especially impressive because we have a Tempur-Pedic, which weighs approximately two hundred thousand pounds and is therefore harder to unmake.

  18. King size duvet for queen size bed is a brilliant idea. Why have I not thought of this?

    Also….heated mattress pad. This has saved our relationship many times!

  19. This post and all the comments have made my day! I read the blog post out-loud to my fiancee and could not stop laughing!!! So many of the comments are totally us! We recently had friends over and showed the around our apartment and he had to explain about the ‘emergency blanket’ on his side of the bed for when I steal the cover! Poor guy!

  20. Pingback: The HitchDied Guide to Cuddling | HitchDied

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