Pillow talk: A Marriage Story

No husbands were harmed in the making of this totally fictional story.

***VIDEO TRANSCRIPT**
(Text on screen reads: "Storytime: Pillowtalk")

"Some of you have asked me about my marriage and how we keep things going, so I thought I'd hop on here and explain a little bit about us and some of the methods that I use to keep things happy and in a state of marital bliss.

Toby and I have been married for 12 very happy years now. And believe me, 12 years is more than enough time to uncover every single one of each other's silly little quirks. And probably my number one piece of advice for a happy marriage is to iron out those quirks where you can, but the ones you can't: just create a workaround. Cause a lot of the time they're too silly to be worth fighting over.

I'll give you an example: I really like to keep a beautifully made bed where everything matches and it's a really nice, attractive, inviting space. I have a huge collection of decorative cushions that get cycled out depending on which bedspread is on the bed at any given time. But Toby has this habit of swapping the pillows out in his sleep.

You know when you make a bed and you put the pillowcases on, the pillow that goes on the bottom normally has the plain pillowcase that matches the sheets, while the pillow that you put on top has the pillowcase that matches the bedspread?

Well, Toby in his sleep will often swap them over so that the plain pillow is on top and the decorative one is on the bottom. It's such a funny little quirk. I've asked him about it before and he says he has no idea he's doing it. So it must be something that he's doing in his sleep, and you can't exactly blame him for something that he's doing in his sleep.

Although I do wish that he would swap them back in the morning when he wakes up, but he's often in a hurry. He just gets out of bed and leaves. He doesn't make the bed or anything.

So, a workaround, I just swap them over. It takes a second, it's no big deal. And this is an example of one of those things that it's just not worth fighting over. I mean, it takes half a second for me to swap the pillows around the way that they should be in the morning and who in their right mind would start a fight over that? Although I have wondered before if I left them alone when he's flipped them the incorrect way, whether or not the following night he would flip them back around the correct way.

And then maybe I could settle for an alternating cycle of them being the wrong way some days and the right way some other days, but somehow they're just always the wrong way with the plain pillow on top instead of the bottom where it needs to be.

So I just had to keep swapping them around every morning, which again, takes half a second and isn't a big deal, but you might be wondering why not just take the pillow that's in the plain pillowcase on the bottom and put it in the decorative pillowcase on the top, since that's clearly where he prefers them to be and he keeps putting them there every night? And you know what? That is the common sense answer, but I tried that.

I tried that and it didn't make a single bit of difference. Whichever pillow is in the plain pillowcase on the bottom, inevitably ends up on the top where it doesn't belong.

And then at that point I thought, well, maybe it's not the pillows, maybe it's the pillowcases and maybe the workaround is that I just need to put different pillow covers on them. So I went through every single combination of every single pillowcase that we own, including acquiring new ones for the purpose of trying to work around this quirk and it still didn't make any difference at all.

And at that point...at that point, you start to wonder whether or not he's doing it on purpose. And that is the kind of thinking that can destroy a marriage. So I had to take a step back and ask myself, what is the real issue here? Because there's not anything morally wrong about having the pillows that way around. It's not a moral sin to have the bottom pillow on top, even if I find it unsightly.

So the problem is actually in my irritation with the issue, which comes from probably rigid thinking about what a bed should look like. And that is something I have control over. I can't control him. I can't control what he does in his sleep and you can't blame someone or be angry at someone for things that they do in their sleep.

But what I can control is my own behavior and I thought the workaround is to get sheets that are exactly the same as the bedspread, because then it doesn't matter how often the pillows get swapped around and the wrong one gets put on top, it will look the same. I will not be able to tell that it's happening and then I won't be frustrated over it anymore.

So that's exactly what I did. But then a new problem arose.

I thought for a couple of days that my workaround had been effective and granted, I think complimentary sheets and bedspreads would look a lot nicer than ones that were completely identical, but it was a compromise I was willing to make to not have the pillow thing niggling at me the whole time.

But then Toby just started removing the pillow from the pillowcase altogether.

So, far from having solved the problem, I'm now waking up every morning to Toby sleeping on a bare pillow with no pillowcase. And no, I'm not having to stack them in the right order anymore, but I am having to stuff a pillow back into its pillowcase. And I'm not gonna complain about the inconvenience of having to put a pillowcase on a pillow, because that would be crazy. I know that.

But he could do it himself, except he doesn't, because he forgets every morning, so I have to do it.

Except I can't do it until he's done sleeping on the pillow because he's a man, he doesn't care about things like pillowcases. I mean, I don't think that man even owned a sheet before we got together. That man's life really needed a woman's touch and I'm happy to provide it, but he keeps making it so hard because I know he says that he doesn't know how it's happening and he keeps doing it in his sleep, but I have never once in my life pulled my pillow out of its pillowcase in my sleep.

But again, that's the kind of thinking that destroys marriages. So I need another workaround.

I need new work around for a new problem because over time what is happening is exactly what anyone with a basic grasp of hygiene and housekeeping could predict: Sleeping on a pillow with no pillowcase is leading it to become discoloured and there are not strong enough words for how much this disgusts and upsets me.

And of course it doesn't bother him at all. You'd think he would notice what is happening to his pillow. You'd think it would bother him to lay his head down on that every night, but apparently it does not. You'd think that a grown adult would be bothered going to bed like that, and at the very least that it would bother him that it bothers me so much. But no, he's just a man and he doesn't care about things like basic hygiene and having a nice place to sleep every night.

So again, I'm thinking about what it is that I can control. At this point, I no longer care about which pillow is on top and whether or not the bedding matches.
All I care about is making sure that the bed is hygienic.

So I think, okay, the workaround here clearly is to get pillow protectors. I get pillow protectors. I will put the pillows in the pillow protectors, the kind with zips, I will zip them up and put them in the pillowcases. And therefore, if in his subconscious mind, he has an urge to remove the pillowcases from the pillows in the night, he will have to pull the pillow out of the pillowcase and he will have to unzip the pillow protector and remove the pillow from the pillow protector...

And that's exactly what happened.

That is exactly what that man did.

So I was forced to go back to the drawing board a final time and to think about what it is that I can control, and see if I could come up with a workaround that would finally deal with this little quirk that was putting so much strain on our marriage.

And it turns out that all along what I could control were my own hands.

So with a bit of muscle and a bare, stained pillow, I was able to get rid of the problem.

(Text appears at the top of the screen which reads: "This is a work of fiction. No husbands were harmed in the making of this story."

Now my bed is made exactly how I like it and I sleep really well knowing that when I wake up in the morning, my pillows will be exactly where they're supposed to be.

Plain one on the bottom, pretty one on the top."