Two Thermostats, One Bed: How We Ended the Blanket War

Joyce and I have slept under one cover for a long time, and for almost all of it we have wanted opposite things from that cover. She sleeps cold. I run hot. In January she wants something pulled up to her chin. I want my legs out from under it by two in the morning. What finally ended the tugging was not a thermostat and not an argument. It was a Bedsure Cooling Cotton Waffle Blanket, queen size, on my half of the bed, with the old comforter folded back over hers. It has been there about thirteen months now.

Before that, the pattern was the same most nights. I would wake around two or three, throw one leg out from under the comforter to cool down, and lie there waiting to get sleepy again. After I retired, that went on for a full year, three or four times a night. Not every night, but enough of them that I got tired of pretending the cover had nothing to do with it.

In October of last year I sat at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and wrote down the five things that were waking me or wearing me out. In this order: noise, light, a sore neck, overheating, and dark mornings. Overheating was fourth. I had already been to see my family doctor during that bad year, and she checked me and found nothing that needed treatment, so this was just a man with a pad of paper and a run of poor nights. Then I went on Amazon and bought one thing for each line on that list, with my own money, all in one order. Everything arrived together that same week and I set all of it up in the same few days.

The Bedsure blanket came in that same October order, ninety inches by ninety inches. It is a waffle weave, half cotton and half rayon derived from bamboo, and it weighs close to nothing in your hands next to the comforter it was meant to stand in for. I put it on the bed the night it arrived. My half of the bed stopped holding heat right away.

My half of the bed stopped holding heat the night it went on. The real test came the next May.

Here is what the winter actually looks like now. From November through March the old comforter stays on the bed, but folded back over Joyce's half of it. I have the waffle blanket on mine. On the coldest January nights, and only those, I pull the edge of her comforter over my legs for the first hour until I am warm, and then it goes back on her side. I have never added a second blanket and I have never folded the waffle one double to get more warmth out of it.

Joyce has her own arrangement and she is entitled to it. She sleeps cold, she has never complained about the streetlight out front, and she sleeps through most things. But she spent enough winters next to a man throwing the covers off at two in the morning to notice the difference. The bed is quieter now, and that is about as much as either of us says about it.

What It Is, and What It Is Not

It is not air conditioning. I want to be plain about that, because the word cooling on a package can set you up to expect too much. The Bedsure blanket does not make you cold. What it does is stop trapping heat against you the way a comforter does, and it breathes enough that you are not lying in your own warmth. The first genuinely warm night last May, the real test, I slept under it with the window open a crack and did not wake up overheated. That is the honest version, and I would rather undersell it than have a neighbor buy one expecting a cold room.

From June through August the comforter goes in the hall closet and the waffle blanket is the only cover over the sheet, for both of us. It has never left the bed except to be washed. It gets machine washed here at home about every two weeks, no bleach, and it has come through about thirteen months of that without fraying or going stiff. One winter and one summer so far, and it is November now.

The gripes are real. It wrinkles, and no amount of smoothing the corners fixes that. On its own in January it is thin, which is exactly why that comforter edge comes over my legs for the first hour. And if you are after something that feels cold to the touch, like a sheet pulled out of a closet in December, this is not that. It is a light blanket that lets heat out, not one that puts cold in.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you that most of what wrecked my sleep was not one big thing, and that the cover on the bed was one of five things to deal with. I would tell you to buy the size that actually covers your half of the bed, because a blanket that leaves a cold gap at the seam just moves the argument instead of ending it. I would tell you that if you run hot and your wife sleeps cold, two covers on one bed is not a defeat. It is a truce, and it works. I would tell you not to expect the blanket to cool the room, because it will not, and not to expect it to be enough on its own in a Wisconsin January, because it is not. And I would tell you that if you have been waking up overheated for a year or more, say so to your own doctor before you spend anything on bedding. Mine found nothing that needed treatment and I was glad to know it, but that visit comes first.

What I notice most, thirteen months in, is that I do not think about the blanket anymore. I get into bed around ten, I pull it up, and my half of the bed is whatever temperature the room is instead of a few degrees warmer. Joyce has her comforter. I have mine. Nobody tugs at anything at two in the morning.