Getting enough sleep often leads to happier relationships, but lack of sleep tends to cause friction between you and your partner. New research published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior This suggests that women in heterosexual marriages are uniquely affected by both their own sleep quality and their partner’s sleep quality. This study provides evidence that the impact of respite on day-to-day relationship tensions differs depending on whether a person is in a same-sex or heterosexual marriage.
Asha Suydam, a doctoral candidate in sociology and graduate research trainee at the Center for Population Research at the University of Texas at Austin, co-authored a new paper with Jamie Hsu to explore how daily rest shapes relationship dynamics. Although sleep is often viewed solely as a biological need, it is also a socially shared behavior. The majority of married people share a bed, so if one partner has a sleepless night, it can easily upset the other partner.
“I became interested in health behaviors while participating in a large-scale data collection project on health and relationships,” Seydam said. “But I never thought of sleep as a sociological thing. Sleep seems like the most private and personal thing imaginable above all else, but it pulled me down one of the most fascinating rabbit holes I’ve ever been down.”
Suydam pointed out that the sociology of sleep actually has a surprisingly long history, and that recent cultural trends have made the topic much more relevant. “The timing felt right. ‘Sleep Divorce’ was all over the news,” she explained. “The idea that sleeping apart can save a marriage. It might help to some extent, but it got me thinking about the bigger issues that couples bring to bed and then implement it the next day. What’s really going on there?”
Most previous research on this topic has focused entirely on heterosexual couples. In such relationships, women often experience more sleep disturbances because housework demands are unevenly distributed. Stress related to nighttime caregiving, emotional labor, and balancing work and home life tends to fall disproportionately on women.
Saydam and Hsu approached their study using a concept known as the gender-as-relationship perspective, and wanted to see if these patterns also held true for same-sex couples. This framework suggests that people experience and behave in gender expectations differently depending on their partner’s gender.
To test their idea, the scientists analyzed data from the Health and Relationships Project. This wide-ranging project was designed to study how relationship dynamics influence adult well-being from midlife to late life.
“I really enjoyed thinking about something as unconventional as sleep through a sociological lens,” Suydam said. “My colleague Jamie Hsu and I used public data from the Health and Relationships Project (HARP), which tracks same-sex and heterosexual couples. The fact that this data includes information from both partners is extremely rare, and is exactly what made this kind of comparison possible in the first place.”
The final sample included 378 couples, equivalent to 756 people. The sample was divided into 106 male same-sex couples, 157 female same-sex couples, and 115 opposite-sex couples. Most of the participants were highly educated, more than half had a graduate degree, and the average relationship length was 15 years.
Couples first completed a baseline survey and then participated in a 10-day daily diary survey. For 10 consecutive days, each spouse took 5 to 10 minutes to complete an online survey separately from their partner. To be included in the final analysis, both couples were required to complete at least 6 of the 10 daily diaries.
Each day’s survey asked participants to rate their overall sleep quality the previous night on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being poor and 5 being excellent). The researchers also measured daily marital tension using four specific questions. Participants were asked how much in the past 24 hours their spouse had disappointed them, acted inconsiderately, bothered them, or not listened to them. The scientists controlled for several factors that can influence both rest and relationship strain, such as total sleep time and external stressors.
This data provides evidence that better sleep quality generally predicts lower interpersonal strain the next day. However, the strength of this association varies markedly depending on the gender composition of the couple.
“First of all, how well you sleep is related to how much friction you experience in your relationship the next day,” Suydam said of the main points. “This especially happens to people who have homosexual relationships with women.”
“Second, this was very significant. The association was particularly strong for women in heterosexual marriages,” Suydam added. “Not only does bad sleep make you grumpy the next day, and it may even make you grumpy the next day, but our research shows that poor sleep quality appears to impact how you meaningfully experience relationships.”
The researchers also looked at how one partner’s sleep quality affected the other partner’s relationship satisfaction. They found that a spouse’s sleep quality had a significant effect only on heterosexual women. “Additionally, heterosexual women are attuned to both their own sleep and their partner’s sleep, and that sensitivity is impossible to miss in our data,” Suydam explained.
Suydam emphasized that although the numerical differences may seem modest, they have practical importance. “Although the effect size is not large in absolute terms, it is consistent and meaningful, especially for women in heterosexual relationships,” she told SciPost. “They already have an increased burden of domestic and emotional labor, which can affect their sleep and how that sleep relates to marital strain. While this is not a surprising finding taken in isolation, it is important that it is supported by data.”
In contrast, the results for men showed a different picture. “Overall, the results for men were surprising,” Suydam noted. “For men who are married to women, we found no significant association between sleep quality and marital tension. And when we looked at gay men, the pattern also appeared to be very different from straight women.”
The authors suggest that men may process the effects of rest differently than women. “Sleep seems to be more functional in men,” Suydam says. “It’s not about it as a relational thing, and whether you sleep or not, you move on. Or maybe men don’t react as emotionally to their own or their partner’s sleep. We can’t say for sure yet, but this is a question worth digging into.”
As with all research, there are some caveats. Suydam cautioned against overgeneralizing the results. “There are a few things worth keeping in mind,” she said. “This is not a nationally representative sample. These couples are mostly middle-aged, long-term married couples, and the sample is skewed towards white people and those with college education. Therefore, the findings most directly impact that group.”
The research design relies on observational data. That is, it does not prove cause and effect, but only identifies associations. “We’re also looking at associations, so we can’t say that sleep deprivation strictly causes marital tension, just that they go together,” Suydam added.
In the future, the authors hope to extend these findings with a wider range of methodologies. “We want to track sleep patterns, not just on a daily basis, but over years, and see how that changes the quality of relationships over time,” Suydam explained. “We’re also interested in how sleep relates to other household dynamics, such as the division of labor and emotional labor between couples.”
The study, “Sleep well and don’t fight? Daily sleep quality and marital tension in same-sex and heterosexual marriages in the United States,” was authored by Asya Saydam and Jaime Hsu.
