![[Adobe Stock]](https://sp-ao.shortpixel.ai/client/to_webp,q_glossy,ret_img,w_750,h_375/https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/sleepy-woman-750x375.jpg)
Getting a good night of rest is often linked to happier relationships, while poor sleep tends to create friction between partners. A new study published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior suggests that women in different-sex marriages are uniquely affected by both their own sleep quality and their partner’s sleep quality. The research provides evidence that the way rest impacts daily relationship strain varies depending on whether a person is in a same-sex or different-sex marriage.
Asya Saydam, a doctoral candidate in sociology and a graduate research trainee at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, authored the new paper with Jaime Hsu to explore how daily rest shapes relationship dynamics. Sleep is often viewed merely as a biological need, but it is also a shared social behavior. Because the vast majority of married adults share a bed, one partner’s restless night can easily disrupt the other.
“I got interested in health behaviors while being part of a large data collection project on health and relationships,” Saydam said. “But sleep never occurred to me as something sociological. Sleep, of all things, seems like the most private, individual thing imaginable yet it pulled me into one of the most fascinating rabbit holes I’ve gone down.”
Saydam noted that the sociology of sleep actually has a surprisingly long history, and recent cultural trends made the topic highly relevant. “The timing felt right. ‘Sleep divorce’ was everywhere in the news,” she explained. “This idea that sleeping apart could save your marriage. It might help to a certain extent, but that got me thinking about the bigger issues couples bring into bed and then carry out of it the next day. What’s actually happening there, day to day?”
Most previous research on this topic has focused entirely on heterosexual couples. In those relationships, women often experience more sleep disruptions due to an uneven distribution of household demands. Nighttime caregiving, emotional labor, and stress related to balancing work and family life tend to fall disproportionately on women.
Saydam and Hsu wanted to see if these patterns held true for same-sex couples, approaching their work using a concept known as the gender-as-relational perspective. This framework suggests that people experience and act out gender expectations differently depending on the gender of their partner.
To test their ideas, the scientists analyzed data from the Health and Relationships Project. This broader project was designed to study how relationship dynamics influence well-being among adults in midlife to later life.
“Thinking about something as unconventional as sleep through a sociological lens was really fun,” Saydam said. “My colleague Jaime Hsu and I used publicly available data from the Health and Relationships Project (HARP), which follows same- and different-sex married couples. The fact that it includes information from both partners is pretty rare and it’s exactly what made this kind of comparison possible in the first place.”
The final sample included 378 couples, which amounts to 756 individuals. The sample was broken down into 106 male same-sex couples, 157 female same-sex couples, and 115 different-sex couples. The participants were mostly highly educated, with over half holding a postgraduate degree, and the average relationship duration was fifteen years.
The couples first completed a baseline survey and then participated in a ten-day daily diary study. For ten consecutive days, each spouse spent five to ten minutes filling out an online questionnaire separately from their partner. To be included in the final analysis, both spouses had to complete at least six of the ten daily diaries.
The daily surveys asked participants to rate their overall sleep quality from the previous night on a scale from one to five, with one being poor and five being excellent. The researchers also measured daily marital strain using four specific questions. Participants were asked how much their spouse had let them down, acted inconsiderate, bothered them, or failed to listen to them over the past 24 hours. The scientists controlled for several factors that could influence both rest and relationship tension, such as total hours of sleep and outside stressors.
The data provides evidence that better sleep quality generally predicts lower relationship strain the next day. However, the strength of this association varied noticeably depending on the gender makeup of the couple.
“First, how well you sleep is linked to how much friction you feel in your marriage the next day,” Saydam noted regarding the primary takeaways. “This is happening especially for women and people in same-sex relationships.”
“Second, and this one really stood out: that link is particularly strong for women in heterosexual marriages,” Saydam added. “It’s not just that bad sleep makes you grumpy the next day, or it might, but our study shows that low sleep quality seems to spill into how you experience your relationship in a pretty meaningful way.”
The researchers also examined how one partner’s sleep quality affected the other person’s relationship satisfaction. They found that spousal sleep quality only had a significant impact on women in different-sex marriages. “In addition, heterosexual women are attuned to both their own sleep and their partner’s sleep and that sensitivity is impossible to miss in the data,” Saydam explained.
Saydam highlighted that while the numerical differences might seem modest, they carry practical importance. “The effect sizes aren’t huge in absolute terms, but they’re consistent and meaningful especially for women in heterosexual relationships,” she told PsyPost. “They’re already carrying more of the household and emotional labor, and that may affect their sleep and how that sleep connects to marital strain. It’s not a surprising finding in isolation, but having the data back it up matters.”
In contrast, the results for men presented a different picture. “Overall, results for men were surprising,” Saydam noted. “We found no significant association between sleep quality and marital strain for men married to women. And when we looked at gay men, the pattern looked really different from heterosexual women too.”
The authors suggest that men might process the effects of rest differently than women do. “It seems like sleep might just operate more functionally for men,” Saydam said. “You slept or you didn’t and you move on, rather than as something relational. Or it could be that men are less emotionally reactive to their own sleep or their partner’s. We can’t say for sure yet, and it’s a question worth digging into.”
As with all research, there are some caveats. Saydam cautioned against overgeneralizing the results. “A couple of things worth keeping in mind,” she said. “This isn’t a nationally representative sample. These couples are mostly mid-life, long-term married couples, and the sample skews white and college-educated. So, the findings speak most directly to that group.”
The research design relies on observational data, meaning it only identifies associations rather than proving cause and effect. “Also, we’re looking at associations, which means that we can’t strictly say poor sleep causes marital strain, just that they move together,” Saydam added.
Going forward, the authors hope to expand on these findings with broader methodologies. “I want to follow sleep patterns over longer periods and not just day to day, but across years and see how that tracks with relationship quality over time,” Saydam explained. “I’m also curious about how sleep connects to other household dynamics, like division of labor or emotional work within couples.”
The study, “Sleep Tight, Don’t Fight? Daily Sleep Quality and Marital Strain in Same- and Different-Sex Marriages in the United States,” was authored by Asya Saydam and Jaime Hsu.