Sleep Divorce Over Snoring? Spend $189 on a Test Before You Move to the Guest Room

Nearly a third of American adults have tried a sleep divorce, according to a 2025 survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and among people 35 to 44 the number climbs to 39%. I get the appeal. Nobody wants to lie awake at 2 a.m. doing math on how many hours are left before the alarm while the person next to you sounds like a leaf blower. But if snoring is what’s sending you down the hall, moving out may solve your problem and quietly hide theirs. The person who hears the snoring every night is usually the only one in a position to notice it’s turning into something a doctor should hear about.

I think sleep divorce is a perfectly good tool for mismatched schedules and blanket wars. For snoring, it should come after a few cheaper steps, and one of them is a test.

Sleep divorce works, but the reasons people give for it aren’t all the same

The AASM survey, run by Atomik Research in June 2025 with 2,007 adults, found 31% of people had slept apart from a partner to sleep better. It also found 37% go to bed at a different time than they’d like just to accommodate the person next to them. That second number is the one I find more telling. A lot of couples are already living a partial sleep divorce without calling it that.

Dr. Seema Khosla, a pulmonologist and AASM spokesperson, put it plainly in the release: “When our sleep is compromised due to a disruptive partner, resentment can grow.” That’s the strongest argument for separate rooms. Bad sleep makes people short-tempered, and a relationship can absorb only so many mornings of “you kept me up again.”

But the reasons behind that 31% aren’t interchangeable. One person reads until midnight and the other gets up at 5. One runs hot and the other sleeps under three blankets. One kicks. One snores. The first three are compatibility problems. The fourth can be a symptom.

Snoring is the one reason that deserves a medical check first

The AASM estimates about 30 million American adults have obstructive sleep apnea, and roughly 23.5 million of them don’t know it. That works out to about 78% undiagnosed. Its own 2021 survey found nearly 70% of people who share a bed say their partner snores. Plenty of snoring is just noise. Some of it is the airway narrowing and closing again and again through the night, which is what sleep apnea is.

The warning signs the AASM lists include loud snoring, choking or gasping, and pauses in breathing that a bed partner sees. Notice who’s doing the observing in that list. The snorer is asleep. You’re the witness. When you move to the guest room, you stop hearing the gasps, your partner stops hearing about them, and the thing you were both annoyed by becomes the thing nobody’s tracking.

This is the piece almost every sleep divorce guide skips. They cover how to bring up separate rooms without hurting feelings and how to keep intimacy alive across a hallway, which are fair questions. They rarely mention that the snoring partner might be the one who needs the conversation most, and not about the bedroom.

Sharing a bed may do more for your sleep than you think

There’s also some evidence that sleeping together isn’t purely a cost. In a 2020 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry, Dr. Henning Johannes Drews and colleagues put 12 healthy couples in a sleep lab for four nights and measured them with and without their partner. When couples shared a bed, they got more REM sleep, and that REM was less disrupted. Their sleep stages also lined up more with each other’s, and that syncing was stronger in couples who rated their relationship as deeper.

Twelve young couples in a lab isn’t a verdict on your marriage, and the researchers said as much. Still, it’s a reason not to assume separate rooms are automatically the better-rested option. If the actual problem can be fixed, you might keep a perk you didn’t know you had.

The cheaper fixes add up to about 86 cents a night

I’d start with your ears. Loop Quiet 2 earplugs cost $24.95 and are rated at 14 dB of noise reduction (NRR). They won’t erase a freight-train snorer, but they take the edge off the ordinary kind, and they’re reusable.

Next, fix the blanket war, which is often half the reason people want out. The Scandinavian sleep method is just two separate comforters on one bed so nobody steals the covers or cooks under someone else’s warmth preference. At IKEA, the SMÅSPORRE warm duvet insert is $49.99 in twin. Two of them run $99.98. If you were going to replace your king insert anyway ($64.99 for the same model), the upgrade to two twins costs you $34.99 more.

Then, if the snoring comes with gasping, pauses, or a partner who’s exhausted no matter how long they sleep, book a test. Lofta’s home sleep test is listed at $189, which includes a short telehealth visit, a device delivered to your door, and a review of the results by a medical practitioner. Your partner wears it for a night in your own bed. Insurance may cover a test ordered through their regular doctor instead, so check that route first.

Add it up: $24.95 for earplugs, $99.98 for two duvets, and $189 for the test comes to $313.93. Spread over a year of nights, that’s $313.93 divided by 365, or about 86 cents a night. Compare that to furnishing a second bedroom, or to living for years next to a breathing problem nobody has looked at.

When separate rooms are the right call, keep the bedtime and lose the guilt

None of this means you’re stuck sharing a bed forever. If the test comes back clear and the earplugs don’t cut it, or if your schedules simply don’t overlap, go ahead and sleep apart. The AASM’s own spokesperson said healthy sleep matters “no matter how it’s achieved,” and I agree.

A few things help a sleep divorce feel like a choice and not a retreat. Keep some shared time in the bedroom before lights out, even 20 minutes of talking or reading side by side. Call it by a name you both like. And keep checking in: if your partner’s snoring gets louder, or they start nodding off at the wheel or at their desk, that’s worth mentioning to a doctor even from down the hall.

If you’re heading into holiday travel and staying with family, bring the earplugs either way. Our piece on the first night effect explains why the first night in a new bed is rough regardless of who’s next to you. And if the sleep conversation turns into a bigger one about what each of you needs, our guide to healthy boundaries in relationships is a good next read.

A sleep divorce can save your mornings. Just make sure it isn’t the reason nobody ever asked why your partner stops breathing at 3 a.m.