American TV host Carson Daly has opened up about his unusual sleeping arrangements with his wife.
Daly, 50, and his wife Siri Pinter, 43, have been married since 2015, but together since 2005.
And it seems that the key to their relationship longevity has much to do with the fact that they sleep in separate bedrooms several times a week.
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Talking to People recently, the NBC TODAY host said he and his wife had decided to start sleeping separately around 2019.
Not because they were having marital problems, mind you — but because they wanted to make sure their marriage lasted the distance.
“The object is to stay together. That’s what we’d like to do,” Daly said, adding that they both “secretly love” sleeping apart.
“And so reverse engineering that, it’s like — by any means necessary, for the two of us, we want to still be in a relationship when we’re dying.”
Jokingly calling it a “sleep divorce,” Daly said the arrangement had actually been good for them.
“We don’t (sleep separately) all the time, but a couple of days during the week — especially if I want to watch an Islanders hockey game kind of later at night — I go into the guest room, she retires upstairs to read her book or watch a show,” he said.
On the nights they do sleep separately, Daly said they part with the words: “Goodnight, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The idea first came about when Siri was pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, Goldie.
“We’re both pretty good-sized humans and it just wasn’t really working when she was in her third trimester, and I also have sleep apnea, which is very sexy for the ladies out there, I’m sure,” Daly revealed (sleep apnea is when a person’s breathing repeatedly stops and starts).
“She couldn’t get comfortable, so were like a commercial you would see, kicking each other and just not sleeping.
“We woke up and we just shook hands like, ‘I love you, but it’s time to sleep divorce. It’ll be the best thing for all of us’.”
After Goldie was born, the couple decided to keep the occasional sleep divorce going, as Daly had a 3am wake-up call time for the TODAY show.
“We’re still sleep divorced, but for discernibly different reasons,” he said of the current situation.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever sleep together again.”
Other celebrity couples that sleep apart
More and more married couples are choosing to sleep separately, for a variety of reasons.
Other celebrity couples who have gone on the record about sleeping separately include Cameron Diaz and Benji Madden, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Falchuk, and even, on occasion, David and Victoria Beckham.
“I think it certainly helps with preserving mystery and also preserving the idea that this person has their own life,” Paltrow told Harper’s Bazaar in 2020.
Diaz said she and Madden had separate bedrooms, with a third bedroom “that we can convene in for our (marital) relations”.
For some, it’s about getting a better night’s sleep — especially if the partner snores, hogs the covers, or moves about a lot during the night.
Others say sleeping separately would be unimaginable for them.
But for Daly and his wife, it clearly keeps them together, rather than driving them apart.
“It works,” he said.
“So I highly recommend sleep divorce.”
