Men are regularly accused of disturbing other people’s sleep with the sort of loud snoring that can travel through walls and make its way around quiet suburban streets. Now a study, albeit a small one, is adding further fuel to that fire by claiming that your wife’s sleep is an important part of the key to a successful marriage.

The study included 32 couples with an average age of 32, who were free of psychiatric, medical or sleep disorders.

The amount of time they took to get to sleep and the number of times they woke in the night was measured over a period of 10 nights.

Each day, subjects were asked to report positive emotions such as feeling supported or valued by their spouse, or negative reactions such as criticism or feeling ignored.

Dr Wendy Troxel, one of the researchers involved in the study explained:

We found that wives’ sleep problems affect her own and her spouse’s marital functioning the next day, and these effects were independent of depressive symptoms.

Specifically, wives who took longer to fall asleep the night before reported poorer marital functioning the next day, and so did their husbands.

After a bad night of sleep, women may be more likely to express irritability or frustration, whereas men might be more likely to withhold that.

Troxel continued that the relationship between nightly sleep and next day’s marital interactions appeared stronger than the association between daily marital interactions and subsequent sleep.

In a previous study, she found that the presence of a husband or partner meant women slept better and that women who are happy in their marriage report fewer sleep disturbances.

Extraordinarily, a man’s failure to fall asleep at night didn’t appear to have the same effect, and husbands’ reports of more positive interactions were often followed by them getting less sleep the next night.

The researchers do not know why this might be.

[Source: Time]