My husband is a good man. We work together to make sure we put food on the table. This marriage would have collapsed a long time ago because when we were going to get married a lot of people said it will not work because the age gap between us is quite huge. I am 36 years, he is 54. We married eleven years ago and we have two kids. Somehow we were conscious of the fact that many were expecting the marriage to fail, so we worked hard to keep it together. I am not from a poor background. My parents are well-to-do and I wasn’t attracted to him because of his money. He was a very gentle and mature man and I fell in love with that. My husband used to snore mildly early on in our marriage. It was a bit irritating even then, but it was just a little flaw compared to his good qualities.
It felt like as he grew older, the snores became louder. Now that he is in is 50s, I can’t sleep in peace. The snores are very loud. We are in a five bedroom house and sometimes I leave him and go and sleep in one of the guest rooms. When he wakes up and I am not close to him, he gets very irritated and tell me it is my place to be by his side all the time. Meanwhile, I am a light sleeper and anytime he sleeps and starts snoring I cannot even catch a second of sleep. His snores are so loud that you can hear him from the kitchen or even downstairs. You can hear him anywhere you are in the house. I am not exaggerating. I have spoken to him about this. I have tried mechanisms such as turning him to the side, but it is not so effective and the sound from his snoring irritates me so much and I feel like I am a lactating mother who can’t sleep because of her crying baby.
Our children are twins, a boy and a girl and they’re ten years. I wonder how they are able to sleep throughout the midnight uninterrupted. Their rooms are just next to ours. Then I realise that children play a lot during the day and so they sleep very deeply. I am not a deep sleeper at all, and so this has greatly affected me. I feel very stressed and overwhelmed all the time. After complaining about my husband’s snoring for a long time, he went to a hospital. When I met him, he wasn’t obese. He was thick tall. But after all these years, he had packed on a lot of weight.
The doctor said he needed to lose weight and that he had a lot of tissue in his throat. This was contributing to the loud snoring. He was given a few oral drops to help open up his throat a bit. Now the actual issue is, the doctor has given us a long term solution to his loud snoring, but he is so stubborn. He would go for a walk today and not go for weeks after claiming that it’s not safe to be walking that early. Meanwhile we live in a gated community and it is a safe place. I also walk our dog every morning and I suggested he does that to exercise as well. He wouldn’t do it.
So there has been no progress. I started using earbuds to block out some of the noise so I can sleep. But I found that to be very uncomfortable and my ears would itch the next day. I bought some ear muffs at the mall. It was better than the earbuds. But I can’t sleep in the same position throughout and when I turn, it would come off and I would wake up and not be able to sleep again. I started taking sleeping pills which helped for a bit, but a doctor friend adviced me to stop taking them as I would be hooked to them and I wouldn’t be able to sleep without them. So at this point I feel like I have tried all I can but I have ended up exactly where I started. I’m wondering if marrying a younger man around my age would have been better. Especially when research has shown that snoring increases when one ages.