Snoring Is Not A Character Flaw

(image via wikimedia)

When I told my wife a few days ago that she snores, she said without hesitation: “No, I don’t.”

I wasn’t surprised.  Snoring denial seems pretty common.  When I told my college roommate 30 years ago that he snored, he denied it.  I too initially denied snoring when my wife accused me of it ten years ago.  After she kicked me out of the bedroom, I decided to get myself checked out.  Now I have a CPAP, which takes getting used to, but my wife and I are back in the same room again.  I admit now that I snore, but I was initially a denier.

I don’t know how snoring deniers know whether or not we/they snore.  We’re asleep when we snore.  In my wife’s case, she snores lightly, like a purr.  It’s endearing, but it might lead to heavier snoring.  Her purring could be a gateway snore that will later lead to health problems, and I don’t want her to risk that.

At the same time, I didn’t want to get into a repetitive argument with my wife over snoring.  After all, we live in the new millenium where we no longer have to argue forever about things that are easily proven true or false.  That night in bed when she started breathing heavily and making light snorting noises, I grabbed my phone and videoed her.  After a few seconds, I had irrefutable proof that my wife snored.  There was no way she could argue with me now.

To be clear, I don’t normally have a need to win arguments.  If I’m wrong about something, I’ll usually admit it.  But I hate knowing that I’m right when somebody else thinks I’m wrong.  I can live with it, but it bugs me.   Plus, I didn’t want my wife to think I was lying about a simple matter as snoring.  And with the phone, I had my proof.

When I began to show my wife the video on my phone, she stopped it and said: “That’s an invasion of my privacy.”

“I’m not putting it on the internet,” I said.  “Just watch it.  It’s proof that you snore.”

“Delete it,” she demanded.

“Just watch it,” I said.

“Delete it.”

I knew then there was no way my wife was going to watch herself snore.  I could play it on the computer or on the television, but that would only make her mad, and I’d have to sleep on the couch, and that would have defeated the purpose of me wearing a CPAP.  Plus, there would be no way for me to monitor her snoring, so I decided to concede.

Still, my wife doesn’t believe me when I tell her that she snores.  She thinks I’m lying.  Maybe she thinks I want revenge for having to wear a CPAP.  Whatever the reason, she thinks she doesn’t snore.  I’d understand if she said that she was surprised that she snores.  But she said I was wrong, and she said it with lots of confidence.

“Snoring isn’t a character flaw,” I told my wife.  “There’s no good reason to deny it.”

“I don’t like false accusations,” my wife said.  “And reading in the middle of the night is a character flaw.  That’s worse than snoring.”

Ugh, I thought.  Sometimes I read in the middle of the night, and my wife claims the light from my phone wakes her up.  It’s not the light that wakes her up; it’s her own snoring.  When I leave the bedroom to read in another room, she claims my movement wakes her up too.  If I switch positions in bed, that wakes up my wife as well, she says.  I know she wakes up because the snoring makes her a light sleeper.

“There’s no reason to get defensive about snoring,” I said.  “It’s just what your body does.  It’s like denying that you sneeze or denying that your farts stink.”

“My farts don’t stink,” my wife said.

My daughters laughed at that, and then they stared at their phones, pretending that nothing had happened.  I knew the discussion was over for the time being.  When an argument degenerates into whether or not farts smell, it’s time to stop. But I’ll see that my wife gets her snoring checked out.  It’s not that I have to be proven right.  It’s a health issue.

*****

What do you think?  Should I give up trying to convince my wife that she snores?  Is it wrong to video snoring spouses while they sleep?  Is it really a character flaw to read in bed?

*****

When I was a kid, I was punished for saying the word crap.  Looking back, it kind of ticks me off because now I know…

And here is the true story of my one moment of high school glory!

Now only 99 cents each on the Amazon Kindle!