My Husband’s Midnight Craving for Sex Is Causing a Big Problem

He’s making this about me.

Advice by Jessica Stoya
06.06.2023

Dear How to Do It,

My husband wakes me up in the middle of the night wanting sex. I struggle to fall back to sleep afterward and have told him so. I wake up very early for work each day, so the fact that he continues to awaken me troubles me because I am not getting adequate sleep. When I bring this up, he claims I wake him up and that he is trying to satisfy my sexual needs. I feel he is gaslighting me, but he continues to insist it is my doing. Help! What should I do?

—Sleep Deprived

Dear Sleep Deprived,

It is possible that your husband is lying to you about this to justify his habit of waking you for sex (or for some other bizarre reason), and also possible that you’re experiencing some form of what is known as sexsomnia (you can read more about the condition in some of our previous columns). You need more information to figure out which one is the reality.

Get one of those little surveillance cameras that records movement and has night vision capacity. Get your husband’s consent to place it in your bedroom. If he balks at the idea of attempting to document these nighttime activities, assume he’s lying about them and proceed accordingly. To be clear, I mean divorce him. If you aren’t the initiator, your consent has been violated and this kind of manipulation is a very concerning red flag.

If he’s on board, think back on how often you supposedly attempt to initiate sex in the middle of the night and use that to get an idea of how long to run this surveillance experiment for. If it’s true that you are engaging in sexual behaviors while asleep, a sleep specialist would be your next step.

—Stoya