Goodbye sleepless nights, hello sexless ones. This seems to be the motto of a new bundle of duvet covers from Ikea, guaranteed to give you a better night’s sleep with zero boning. The two single duvet covers come in a “TOG-ether bundle,” Mashable reported, so that two people can sleep in a bed hermetically sealed off from each other with their very own individual duvets, rather than have to negotiate any of the pesky touching or warmth that comes with sleeping under one big duvet. Ikea will sell the bundle for two days only in the U.K., January 27 and 28, for about 40 pounds ($55 U.S.), a small price to pay to never have sexual intercourse again.
At a glance, the TOG-ether bundle looks like it makes some kind of sense. Here, it would seem, are two peacefully resting people in a bed with single-serve blankets to meet their exact, individual needs. Ikea’s own research found that about half of people say the covers are pulled off them in the middle of the night to miserable effect. Everyone who has ever shared a bed with a partner knows this awful truth. Yet part of the motivation to share the bed is all that easy sex. So here is the conundrum: If the other person hogs the covers it will kill your sleep dead. And bad sleep only makes couples fight more. This makes you less likely to want to fuck the very person you liked enough to want to share a bed with in the first place.
I sympathize, but I assure you that the answer to all this is not these two twin duvet covers. Upon closer examination, these two cozy sleepers in the photo also look like they’re sleeping in two twin beds pushed together and will never so much as brush against each other in the night, hungry for each other’s all-consuming touch. Nothing says sexy like wrapping yourself in your own individual burrito before hitting the sack.
The two single duvets raise a host of logistical questions, too: If it’s cold out and you want to have sex under the covers, then what? Don’t say, “You’ll just use the top sheet, of course,” because many people use duvets for the express purpose of getting rid of the top sheet. That’s a problem in itself — for starters, it’s much easier to wash your sheets than your blankets, so keep the top sheet, please — but the point here is that a top sheet is not enough warmth when you are cold but still would like to have sex.
Now you have two tiny blankets, neither of which can cover the both of you should you actually want to touch. Are you supposed to pull out an extra blanket for sex and then put it away after and return your individual duvet covers to bed to fall asleep? Are you supposed to invite the other person to join you under your tiny duvet after the lights go out? Now all your sex is like sex in a sleeping bag. Great if it’s all you’ve got one night while actually camping — terrible in your own home.
There’s lots of advice out there on how to set up a bedroom so you can actually have sex in it: Paint the walls purple, wash your sheets, nix the fluorescent light. And an equal amount of advice on how to make it best for sleeping: Paint the walls blue, wash your sheets, nix the fluorescent light.
But we shouldn’t have to choose between sex and sleep at this stage of capitalism, and it’s one thing to compromise on paint colors when most of your best activities in this room involve lights being off, and quite another to insist on two individual blankets so you will never have sex again all in the interest of getting a good night’s sleep.
We want our bedrooms to be great for sleeping and great for having sex. Is that really so much to ask?
Ikea said it’s how the Swedish sleep, after all, and they are a Swedish company. Given our obedience to all things Ikea, and our general obsession with Swedish exports (recently, Swedish death cleaning and lagom, which, yes, Ikea also has a furniture line around) this implies we should all want to sleep like the Swedish as much as we all want to live like the Swedish.
And that’s not entirely wrong: If anything, the Swedish have a reputation for being heavy on the booze, loose in the sheets and progressive as hell everywhere else—not a bad way to live, all told. This is the country which once held a national contest to come up with a word for female masturbation (they settled on klittra, which also sounds like the name of an Ikea beanbag).
No verdict, though, on whether that means all the drunken sex they are having is any good — they don’t make the list of the top 10 most sexually satisfied countries, at least as of 2014. (Neither do we.)
But any country notorious for long, dark, cold winters has no business making it impossible to have sex in a bed without a real blanket. I realize arguing that anything Swedish is bad will likely fall on deaf ears: After all, Sweden produced both ABBA and the bleakly beautiful films of Ingmar Bergman.
But even Ikea makes mistakes, and I would note that some of their biggest ones involve the bedroom — the kid’s dressers are dangerous and the mattresses suck. We may continue to worship at the hem of the Swedish garment in most things, but if you can’t keep your covers on your body, don’t forgo your sex life. Instead, try this cover clamp where you can basically strap your partner into bed to keep the covers safe — that at least has the potential for sexiness, right?
Tracy Moore
Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.
