Most people hop into bed at night and have one side they prefer to sleep on over the other.
However, one woman took to TikTok to admit that she and her husband pick random sides of the bed to sleep on each night, and that they have no set sides.
Angelina Murphy, who goes by the username @renovatingourhome on the platform, posted a video last week wanting to see if anyone could relate her sleeping arrangements with her husband. “We do not have a regular side of the bed that we sleep on,” she announced in her 11 August TikTok. “It’s never discussed; we just randomly pick a side when we go to sleep.”
Murphy also said in the video that, whenever the topic comes up in conversation, people view it as “the craziest thing they’ve ever heard,” before explaining that she wanted to know if her TikTok viewers felt the same way. However, the majority of viewers sided with critics of the couple’s sleeping arrangements.
“I hope you both get the help you need,” one commenter joked. “I’m single, and I have a side of the bed,” a second commenter mentioned.
“My husband has his side and it is the same even at the hotel, guest room, and tent. Doesn’t matter. It’s in stone,” another wrote.
Other people were more concerned about how the couple’s things are distributed in nightstands. “I have things. My things. On my side. Chapstick. Water cup. Lotion. Hair ties. My things,” one viewer wrote.
So many viewers had questions that Murphy and her husband both posted a follow-up video the next day answering some of them. As for nightstands, she called them “glorified junk drawers” and said they do not warrant staying on a concrete side. According to the couple, they both have interchangeable phone chargers, with beauty products like lotion staying in the bathroom.
“We definitely didn’t expect this video to go viral at all, but we are finding all of the comments and the general response super funny!” Murphy said in a statement to The Independent.
As much as commenters may disagree with the lack of set sides of the bed, a relationship expert thinks that it may be a good thing. Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington, told Insider that there are benefits to the arrangement. “I think that they’re freed from a kind of possessiveness about order that most of us have, and it makes their life a lot more flexible,” she said.
Schwartz told the outlet that the concept only scares people because there is no sense of habit and humans are “creatures of habit.” "I think it’s truly disturbing to people that somebody’s living without a habit," she said.
The professor explained that when couples create a life together, certain routines and roles become established, such as the one person who always takes out the trash or does the driving, and the general public is concerned that this specific couple doesn’t seem to have this routine. "The fact that these people have never decided that, ‘Okay, this is a way we order our lives together,’ makes people nervous because it kind of questions the whole way everybody creates a couple life," Schwartz said.
