Among the many questions we get anytime someone finds out about our relationship is about sleeping arrangements. I know of other Poly relationships that the members thereof rotate where they sleep so that everyone gets a chance to sleep with everyone else. We all sleep in the same bed, every night that we’re all home at least. The next thing that comes up is how do we manage that? The answer is custom built. The four of us sleep on two full-size beds put together on my own, essentially a platform bed, that holds them together, making one VERY large bed.
I had a king-size waterbed when I met the Bear (I know, I know – both a little smarmy, and a lot throwback, but I had slept on a waterbed since I was about 13. It was a hard habit to give up), and we were still sleeping on it when we met the Cub. Three bear-sized men on a king-size bed kind of worked, but it was definitely snug. It took a few years, but eventually, between the three of us and the dogs who feel it’s their right to sleep in bed with daddies, we had to upgrade.
It took a little while to figure out exactly how we were going to do it, but it became obvious VERY quickly that it would involve multiple mattresses one way or another. The dimensions of our bedroom also created a set of parameters we had to work within, giving us a limited number of options. We debated doing a king next to a twinXL, but that might single one of us onto a separate mattress so that got nixed fairly quickly. After that we considered doing three twinXL mattresses next to each other, but that Might work against any of us snuggling. Eventually we decided on two full-sized beds. It gave us the biggest configuration with the least chance of isolating one of us. So we got rid of the waterbed, I built a new bed and got two brand new full-size mattresses and box springs.
We slept the directions of the mattresses for a little while, but as I’m sure you can guess, in order to snuggle, one person was on the seam which wasn’t all that comfortable, or one of us ended up isolated from the others. It wasn’t very long before we decided to sleep across the mattresses, it would put the seam across the tops of all of our legs, and it worked out well – until the Boy joined us.
Now we sleep the same direction of the mattresses, four wide. We sleep in the same place most nights, with periodic rotations within the same bed. There’s no real formula to changing around, just when one of us want to snuggle with someone they haven’t gotten to sleep next to in a while. We shuffle around. We all have our own individual comforter because it seems we all get too warm or too cool at different times during the night. Not to mention I pretty much always sleep with a foot out of the covers, and the Cub sleeps practically cocooned most of the time, so sharing covers doesn’t work really well, but we have all been known to overlap them to snuggle with whoever is next to us.
So there you have it, the evolution of, and the manner in which, four full grown men share a “single bed.”
Mike is a 40 something bear in the great Metropolis of Fort Wayne, IN. He lives with his 3 partners and works in the retail home improvement industry. He has been active in the gay community in Fort Wayne and online for 20+ years, having volunteered for a gay/lesbian helpline, been involved in multiple LGBT community groups, and worked as a DJ in multiple gay clubs. His Gay Open Poly Bear Quad blog can be seen at http://gopbqfortwwayne.blogspot.com/
