To Sleep Together, Or Not To Sleep Together

I need your help deciding

Welp, here I am APW. It’s the week of my wedding.

I’m not stressed? Who’s stressed? Haha. But seriously, I am a tiny bit stressed but holding up okay and getting really damn excited.

In these last few weeks before our weekend o’ fun, Trisha and I have run into some funny little things we’re questioning and feeling unclear about. One of them is the age-old question (or is it) of whether or not we should spend the night together on the eve of our wedding. I felt like we were pretty set on staying in the same bed until a family member (who was 100% well-meaning) said that we should stay separate. Suddenly we were thrown into a total whirlwind of confusion and not knowing what we actually want on this one.

I did a smidge of research about the history of it all and found what I already knew to be true… staying apart the night before your wedding is a tradition pretty rooted in old, heteronormative, and misogynistic history. According to Marie Claire, “the tradition’s roots come from when couples wouldn’t meet until their wedding, with fathers tricking the grooms into thinking that the bride was more attractive than she was, forbidding them to see each other until her veil was removed. Seeing as this would usually be after the wedding ceremony, the groom would therefore be stuck in the arrangement.” Umm… record scratch…. WHAT?!?

Okay, I honestly believed that it was even less… um… yucky. I thought it was just around celibacy and ‘purity’ (😝) until the wedding night. Okay, you’re right, that’s just as icky.

Anyway, our well-meaning family member, and lots of friends when we ran polls on our Instagrams, told us that they stayed apart to build anticipation, to increase that longing/’I miss you’ feeling, and to spend time with friends the night before. We also noticed, based on our very-not-scientific polling practice, that most of our queer friends voted ‘sleep together’ and most of our heterosexual friends voted ‘sleep separately.’ In the end, we were left with more questions than answers. So here I am to ask you all, you level-headed humans that make up the APW community… HELP US!

xo,
Alyssa

Did you and your spouse sleep together the night before your nuptials? Or, are you planning to? Or, are you team anticipation and separations? And I’m going to need to know why? Spill the tea.  

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