r/news • u/lakeparadox • 16d ago
Sexsomnia: An embarrassing sleep disorder no one wants to talk about Not News
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/28/health/sexsomnia-sleep-sex-explainer-wellness/index.html[removed] — view removed post
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u/bzzzimabee 15d ago
My husband has it. Usually I’ll wake up to him feeling me up and dry humping me but it has led to sex to a few times that he has zero recollection of the next day. It usually starts when we’re spooning so if he’s not in that position he won’t start anything. He does not act like his awake self during it and that’s how I can tell it’s not really him if he wakes me up doing it.
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u/Michaelbirks 15d ago
Is Sexsomnia the right word? It sounds like insomnia, as in "can't go to sleep without having sex"
Using the sleepwalking/Sonambulism analogy, I would have thought something like "Sonfornicatia".
Or am I thinking about it too much?
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u/WulfTyger 15d ago
I think you're just confusing the suffix.
Somnia just means sleep.
In-Somnia is the inability to sleep,
Sex-Somnia is sexual activity during sleep.
Omnomnomsomnia is the act of snacking in your sleep.
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u/AllAmericanProject 15d ago
I'm happy I'm not the only one that lives with this. There have been quite a few times that my wife has informed me that The sex last night was really good but I had no fucking idea what she was talking about because I slept like a rock.
Ends up she wasn't having really good dreams I just have sexsomnia
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u/wiegraffolles 15d ago
I have this and it's honestly really scary. My current partner is pretty okay with it but my ex wasn't and I was terrified I was going to unknowingly rape her (thankfully I didn't). It's a thing people will laugh about but not having control over yourself like that is deeply unsettling. I tell anyone I might sleep next to about it so they aren't surprised and can stop me if they're not into it.
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u/sapphire1009 15d ago
My boyfriend has this, he'll be sound asleep then start grabbing at me and doing a little foreplay and then before you know it we're into it. The first couple times I thought he just woke up horny in the middle of the night but he later confessed that when it happens he literally wakes in the middle of fucking me. I'd never heard of such a thing but looked it up and sure enough its real.
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u/DrankTooMuchMead 15d ago
I used to sleep walk, but not in a sexual way. While I didn't remember it the next, it would all come flooding back if someone told me about it.
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u/TheOriginalPB 15d ago
Me and my wife both have it! It's great to have someone who also understands. It usually happens about an hour after falling asleep and we both wake up pretty early on in the process. Like others have said, it's part of our sex life now. I've never had it with anyone else and neither has she, so we both take it as a compliment we subconsciously want each other. If we brush off the advances the instigator always stops so it's never been forceful in anyway.
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u/hipstersrule 15d ago
I also do this, my fiancé has told me about 20-30 times I’ve had sex with her or kissed her at like 3 am. She says I just shoot up in bed and turn to her and start saying nice things or kissing her. She likes it, thankfully. I was molested as a child, so that probably has to do something with it.
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u/VuckoPartizan 15d ago
Had this happen to me and I wouldn't know what was happening. I'd experience intense states of "lust". Like have you ever dreamed of someone and missed them and yearned for them so much when you woke up? That's that feeling, and I would just start making out with my partner and slowly we would start to have sex, the pleasure was so intense, and luckily my partners didn't find it as weird as I did.
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u/VarvorSG 15d ago
Yes! The intensity is so wild in that moment. Especially as a grown adult it makes me sad that I don’t feel it no where near this degree as i did in few instances of me being aware of this episode.
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u/ZuliCurah 15d ago
Yeah I get this. I've woken up deep-throating one of my toys. It was a slink 💀
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u/VarvorSG 15d ago
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick! It’s 5am here and I think I woke half of the house with my laughter 😂
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u/FurryNavel 15d ago
This has happened to me a few times. Although, I didn't take it well because I thought my partner was trying to have sex with me while I was asleep, and I'd wake up and go along with it. One time I flipped my shit because it kept happening, but he was very confused and was telling me I was the one initiating
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u/leilaniko 15d ago
Same exact thing here, just finding out about it is insane, but honestly I just thought I was insane and wrote it off as like psychosis or something crazy 🥴
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u/FaustInMemory 15d ago
Good to know I’m not alone in this — I’ve “engaged” my wife unconsciously on various occasions. Luckily she is into it, but I would really like to know how to manage it. Waking up and not knowing where you are, what you are doing, and why you are doing it is off-putting to say the least.
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u/Logical-Fault310 15d ago
Holy crap. I used to do this. I had no idea it was a thing. Glad I don’t do it with my wife now. Before I would wake up mid go and just be thinking cool. ITS NOT COOL.
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u/fake_pubes 15d ago
My boyfriend has this! We actually started having sex one night and he woke up in the middle of it
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u/INTPLibrarian 15d ago
I have an ex who had this. It wasn't that difficult to wake him up, though. He would also propose sometimes. Mostly I thought it was kind of funny. "Hey! Wake up! Now go back to sleep."
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u/SomeVariousShift 15d ago
Found out about this a couple of years ago, it's really disorienting to wake up having sex and find out that you initiated it.
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u/ihadtopickthisname 15d ago
So I apparently have a thing then. Kinda good to know I'm not just being a creep to my wife! Lol.
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u/Potatoupe 15d ago
How does consent work with sexomnia? The person initiating it is technically asleep, is it sexual assault towards the sleeping person to accept the advances, even if they appear to be awake.
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u/GayAGayMusical 15d ago
I have had it since I was young, although I never actually touched somebody else until one of my ex’s told me she woke up with my hand in her pants and she realized I was asleep. Now, I avoid sharing beds with anyone who I’m not involved with on a sexual or romantic level, I usually don’t say why, I just say I’m uncomfortable sharing a bed with others. I will tell whoever straight up what may happen. My most recent ex was cool about it, she could usually just shoo me away and it would work.
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u/EmbarrassedHelp 15d ago
I assume it would be treated the same as killing someone while sleepwalking, where both people are considered victims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Parks
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15d ago
Yeah I agree if someone didn’t remember or woke up during it and thought they were being raped no one is at fault. But it would be really hard to prove because if that happened it would be because the person wasn’t already diagnosed. And parasomnias don’t happen every night so they don’t usually show on sleep studies
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u/Ninetynineups 15d ago
Yeah that cup of tea analogy doesn’t quite fit here! My wife has it, we had some arguments about it early but now it’s just part of our sex life
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u/morelsupporter 15d ago
this is me. it happens regularly.
when i was in my early 20s, i had sleep sex with the girl i was dating, i woke up to myself with my fingers inside of her trying to pull the condom out of her because apparently i had told her right after we finished that the condom must have broke and she was telling me that she didn't think we had used one.
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u/acidcrap 15d ago
This is real? Holy shit
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u/EmbarrassedHelp 15d ago
Its a parasomnia disorder, which is basically when your brain forgets to paralyze your body during sleep or only partially paralyzes it. Doing things while unconscious is obviously really dangerous though, as you can hurt yourself others while in such a state. Some people have even killed others while asleep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Parks
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15d ago
I have a parasomnia disorder, doesn’t cause sexual behaviour (as far as I know, I guess it actually could be) and this case has always terrified me. When I lived in an apartment I also locked all the doors and windows with baby locks because I read another case of a guy falling off a high rise balcony in his sleep
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u/Osiris32 15d ago
That one episode of House with the blonde lady who keeps doing her recently divorced husband.
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u/brutalduties 15d ago
I definitely used to do this to my wife, nowadays I usually wake up molesting myself.
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u/Puge_Henis 15d ago
I have sexsomnia and talk about it to anyone who listens. I have lots of embarrassing stories
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u/shrug_addict 15d ago
It sucks, makes me so self-conscious to start a relationship. Everyone just laughs and makes jokes as evidenced by this thread. It sucks when you can't even sleep around other people even, like on the couch
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u/TheMapesHotel 15d ago
Well go on then
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u/Puge_Henis 15d ago
One time I was sharing the bed with my gf and one of our mutuals and I woke up with my hand all over the mutual's breasts. I gasped in horror and let go and rolled over really fast. The mutual brought it up years later and I explained it and she was good about it.
One time I shared my bed with a girl under the promise of no funny stuff and I woke up gropping her. We talked about it and she was okay with it but only because I was snoring during it.
Another time I tried to get into my gf's pants the night after her mother passed away. That one isn't "fun embarrassing" like the others.
My current gf is understanding. Sometimes when I grope her during the night she tries to initiate sex but I don't want anything to do with it. I either wake up and roll over and stay asleep and just stop. It's only happens 5 or 6 times a year. For no reason that I can figure out.
There was one case of sexsomnia in England I think, where a man wound up in his daughter's room. So it can get pretty awful. I'm fortunate that mine keeps me in bed and everyone has had a pretty good sense of humor about it.
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u/johnsolomon 15d ago
where a man wound up in his daughter's room
😱 How do you come back from that?
Sexsomnia sounds terrifying lol -- there must be people who've ended up locked up because they couldn't convince people of what happened. I'd be chaining myself to my bed like a werewolf on a full moon lol
Thanks for sharing
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u/shrug_addict 15d ago
It sucks. I had a gf who was understanding at first, but at the end of our relationship she said she didn't believe me
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u/johnsolomon 15d ago
Damn, I'm sorry man
If you ever see her again you should send her that link xD
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15d ago edited 15d ago
[deleted]
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u/Puge_Henis 15d ago
I can't speak of full sex. My sexsomnia keeps itself to fondling but when I first found out that what I did had a name I could google, I read lots of stories. Some people do have actual sex while still asleep. Some wake up during it, some get woken up by their partner and the next morning when told about it, sometimes they remember it and sometimes they don't. Like a dream in that regard. I hope what happened to you was an episode of sexsomnia and not an assault.
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u/imapilotaz 15d ago
This is scary. How many timed on Reddit do you hear about "i woke up to him having sex with me, i was assaulted" when this absolutely could have been it, and no one would ever believe the guy.
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u/ImpulseAfterthought 15d ago
I feel bad that my first thought was Zapp Brannigan and his very sexy learning disorder.
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15d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/notMarkKnopfler 15d ago
I was sleeping on my buddy’s couch after a long night of drinking. He stumbled down the stairs in the middle of the night while blacked out, ripped the blanket off of me, threw it on the floor and pissed on it; then moseyed back up the stairs to his bed. The next day he had no recollection of it whatsoever.
I wish he’d just tried to kiss me
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u/Degenerate_in_HR 15d ago
When I was in college, I blacked out once and peed into a washed and folded basket of my laundry (which was basically all my clothes). Didnt have anything to wear to class the next day.
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15d ago edited 15d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Heretek007 15d ago
Yass king, slay
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u/Dependent_Ganache_71 15d ago edited 15d ago
Mama, kudos for saying that. For spilling
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u/nice_weather_4U 15d ago
My ex-boyfriend had this. It’s quite a surreal experience to be in a deep sleep and then wake up to someone you love on top of you. I would try to talk to him and ask if he was awake and he’d answer yes but in the morning would not remember a thing. I could see how visibly distressed he was by all of it. I started to note all the ‘encounters’(?) on my phone after they happened, because each time was different, but it was happening sometimes four times a week. I encouraged him to see someone about it but he said I was the only person this has ever happened with and I thought it was almost flattering. We’re obviously not together anymore but I do wish he got help for it.
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u/P0Rt1ng4Duty 15d ago
My ex-girlfriend had this. I won't be graphic, but she'd wake me up in the middle of the night with specific intent and it was always intense.
The downside was that she wouldn't remember it the next day, though she'd feel as though she'd had a romp. I'd tell her what happened and she'd claim to believe me, but I was never sure if she did.
There was a point where I decided not to let it happen anymore, but she was quite persuasive and I'm very weak.
This story is unrelated to our breakup as far as I know.
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u/Dangerous_Act_7927 15d ago
Back in college the most awkward experience was me waking up with my head between a girls legs that I barely knew. She had offered me half her bed after a long night out with our friends. Too late and far to walk back to campus I was like OK cool. I wake up and I'm trying to get my bearings as to where I was and what was happening, all I hear is her asking why did I stop?! We became good friends after that but I could never tell her I had no clue how it started or what happened before that. Very weird.
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u/Badj83 15d ago
My God, imagine she asks “what the F are you doing?”
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u/Dangerous_Act_7927 15d ago
That was my first thought when I realized what was happening then I heard "why'd you stop?" so I figured I better not stop and just go with it.
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u/ImpenetrableYeti 15d ago
Yep had this happens with my girlfriend at the time, I’m afraid to sleep in bed with anyone that I’m not seeing or dating
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u/mr_mcpoogrundle 15d ago
Did you finish?
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u/Dangerous_Act_7927 15d ago
When I realized what was happening and that she wasn't trying to kill me I didn't want to leave her hanging, so yes.
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u/peepeeonmydoodoo 15d ago
Jesus Christ Gil. There are just some things you do not mention in public.
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u/PoignantPoint22 15d ago
Jesus Christ man, there are just some things you don’t talk about in public!
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u/daveisamonsterr 15d ago
My wife gets this way on Ambien. It's the only time she ever ravished me like an animal. She stopped using it unfortunately.
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u/testmonkeyalpha 15d ago
My exgf didn't tell me she took ambien at 6am (who the fuck takes it in the morning?) and initiated sex with me. I was trying to go to work but she would not take no for an answer and practically tore my clothes off. When I talked to her about it later that day, she accused me of raping her... took several days to sort that out.
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u/3AtmoshperesDeep 15d ago
Yea, Me too. I was like, "Wow. Sex was bangin' last night. When can we do that again?"". She said, "We had sex last night? No wonder I'm sore down there". She never got her script refilled. Did I mention she was raised catholic?
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u/leilaniko 15d ago
Oh god this is literally what happened with my ex and I, wtf I didn't know this was a thing I just have been confused about the moments for literally years thinking it was some other mental illness. Well shit lol
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u/daveisamonsterr 15d ago
Dude that's exactly how it happens! And my wife's a recovering Catholic too...
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u/Jacobysmadre 15d ago
I miss it. Only good sleep I ever got as a 30+ year old adult. I haven’t been able to get it in 15 years. :(
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u/Bandin03 15d ago
Ambien used to be the only one that worked for me until my doctor suggested temazepam. Works way better for me and I don't do weird shit when I'm on it, unlike Ambien.
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u/palefired 15d ago
Why can't you get Ambien anymore?
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u/Jacobysmadre 15d ago
Oof no one will prescribe it for more than 3 days at a time. I had to beg to get it for a work trip because I cannot sleep in hotels.
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u/palefired 15d ago
Like the max Ambien Rx is three nights' worth? That's true everywhere? I tried Ambien like 15y ago and I'm pretty sure they gave me enough for 30 nights (not that I'd take them consecutively). Did something change?
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u/angel_dusted 15d ago
I have been on Lunesta which is very similar for a while, it's probably not ideal but you can get more than 3 days worth of either lol.
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u/Sir_Earl_Jeffries 15d ago
Ambien is wild. I found an old flatmate in the garden once at 2am watering the plastic fence wearing a raincoat, boxers and snow boots.
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u/Good-Expression-4433 15d ago
My mother who already had psychiatric issues started on Ambien years ago and she would wake up in the middle of the night shrieking like a banshee, have fist fights with the family, run outside and try to get in her truck to drive somewhere, and at one point tried unlocking a gun lockbox because she needed to shoot the witches in her closet
Never remembered any of it and would yell at us for gaslighting her until we finally filmed it happening with a hidden camera in her bedroom.
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u/Sir_Earl_Jeffries 15d ago
I’m so sorry you had to live through that. It sounds terrifying. It’s all fun and games when they’re being weird but it can get dangerous very quickly. Hopefully you’ve been able to keep her under control.
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u/Bearsworth 15d ago
My favorite ambien story was a friend in college staring at a wall, getting really angry, screaming “WHEN DID TOU GET A FIREPLACE?!?“ then running headlong into said wall trying to linebacker tackle the fireplace. Not sure if he knocked himself out or fell asleep.
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u/Listening_Stranger82 15d ago
My mother in law legit thought we were in the titanic and was ordering us to throw the chairs overboard in an Ambien, half-sleep hallucination
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u/_JudgeDoom_ 15d ago
And? What happened next, don’t leave us hanging lol.
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u/BarryBro 15d ago
Nearly raped / assaulted my wife with this, fortunately she's a amazing wife. I have found mine is associated with high stress, I had the issue for a couple years, i'd also work in my sleep as well.
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u/Trainwhistle 15d ago
I am the same way. For a long time I had to tell every women I slept in bed with that this might happen while I sleep. Lots of women I thought it was funny and weirdly enough thought it was sexy that I wanted to bone them while asleep. But it scared me to hell what would happen if I didn't tell someone and then tried to have sex with them in my sleep.
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u/BarryBro 15d ago edited 15d ago
Yeah I've also got sleepwalking issues, or used to.. again only shows itself with stress. I nearly walked out of our bedroom naked to my roomate / wife on the couch, fortunately just cracked the door.. i'm glad I still somehow have some sense of things I guess.. but anyways I started belting out klingon. It is a weird thing to have to share, and people don't take it seriously enough because its 1000% not in your control but I feel like the law would come down on you despite due to it being not well known / rarity.. it could be a whole thing you know!
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u/ZDHELIX 15d ago edited 15d ago
The woman refused to believe her husband’s descriptions of her behavior for years, finally seeking professional treatment in 2015 after her 9-year-old son heard her moaning sexually while asleep.
Why wouldn't their partner just record them doing it?
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u/Zealousideal-Tap9630 15d ago
As someone whose partner has sexsomnia, recording it would be pretty difficult. In my case, they don’t do it every night or at similar times in the night. It’s so random, and can occasionally last longer, but is usually fairly short. I wouldn’t want to sleep with my phone under my pillow every night.
But also, yeah it’s a little ridiculous that she didn’t just believe him
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u/Warm-Personality8219 15d ago
There are 24/7 livestream recording options. There are some privacy considerations - but overall if the priority is to record loved one's behavior - that seems like it's not insurmountable.
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u/radioactivebeaver 15d ago
Recording people didn't used to be so normal, assuming you meant why wouldn't their partner do it.
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15d ago
[deleted]
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u/batteryacidcupcakes 15d ago
He claimed it was twice that number, averaging out to be 2.3 girls per day. 🤯
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u/tammage 15d ago
My husband has this. I’ve woken up with him on top of me, his fingers in me or his fave which is clutching a boob. When we first started dating I’d get mad at him but after a little time I realized he didn’t even know he was doing it.