Earlier this month, Cameron Diaz made headlines — and raised eyebrows — during a conversation on Molly Sims's "Lipstick on the Rim" podcast, when she posited that "We should normalize separate bedrooms." Diaz, who has a three year-old daughter with husband Benji Madden, added, "To me, I would literally, I have my house, you have yours. 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."
Maybe it's not a separate room. Maybe it's a separate bed, or a separate schedule. However it's defined, though, the idea of distinct sleeping arrangements, also known by the doom-laden sobriquet "sleep divorce," sounds like a marital death knell. You can feel the judgment, the implied sense of banishment, in a New York Times story on the subject from just earlier this year. "Is it really because a partner tosses and turns too much?" writer Ronda Kaysen pondered. "Or is that an excuse to avoid talking about bigger problems at home?" One therapist quoted for it gently called the practice a "mild pink flag," whatever that means. Either it's a red flag or it isn't, right? And do we need so much semaphore to understand our relationships?
