It Turns Out That There Are Two Sides to This Bedtime Story

In the 1973 movie “A Touch of Class,” characters played by George Segal and Glenda Jackson are poised to engage in a hotly anticipated, illicit sexual tryst.

Suddenly, mid-kiss, he stops to ask if she would mind moving to the other side of the bed.

She resists.

He insists that her side is “more natural” for him. She argues that it is “more natural” for her.

Anyone who’s ever heard “That’s my side!” from a bedmate has experienced the real-life drama of mattress territoriality.

Viktor Budnik, a Venice director and photographer, has slept on the left side of the bed since he was a child and still must. Luckily, his wife favors the right side of the bed.

Budnik found out just how left-side-dependent he is when he was forced to sleep at a friend’s house in a twin bed that foiled his side sensibility.

“I couldn’t really have a side,” said Budnik, 50. “I couldn’t sleep at all. I had terrible dreams, hellish dreams, agonizing trying-to-fall-asleep dreams. Finally I told my friend who I was staying with that I would be better sleeping on the couch because I could have a side.”

So Budnik set up a night table with a lamp, alarm clock, photos of wife, child and dog. And slept.

Staking out a side of the bed begins when parents tuck their children in on one side or the other, said sleep expert Dr. Yury Furman. Sliding in on the same side every night can become part of an automatic pre-sleep ritual, which, like a favorite pillow or familiar lullaby, releases us into sleep by virtue of its sameness.

Whether we swap sides later--to be nearer a night stand or a baby’s crib, or because a mate has a bigger side-of-the-bed issue than we do--depends on the powers of individual adaptability, said Furman, director of Pacific Sleep Medicine Services in Los Angeles and Encino.

Regardless, most people have a pronounced pull toward one side or the other. Standoffs over the issue may not be relationship deal-breakers, but, for the compromising party, the change can discombobulate.

“I am on the left side because my fiance had to have the other side,” said Angie Pettera, 30, of Sherman Oaks. “I adjusted, but it was hard at first because I was oriented to getting up on the other side. Plus I prefer to be close to the door leading out of the room because I don’t feel as trapped.”

But since her fiance has been working in Luxembourg for the last six months, like loggerhead sea turtles returning to their birthplace, she is gravitating back to her original side.

“I am smack in the middle now. I do think if you leave the homestead, you abandon your sides-of-the-bed rights,” Pettera said. “When you come back, you have to reestablish your side.”

For some, bedside choice has to do with room design more than anything else.

“I am on the left side because we have a door leading to the outside on the other side of the bed, and I like to feel a little more protected,” said Beth Faulkenstein, a 35-year-old Valley Village mother of two. “It is not arbitrary. I like to feel secure.”

Practitioners of feng shui, the Chinese art of achieving balance and harmony through placement, call the side near the door the “command position,” which makes that person the protector. Faulkenstein’s husband, however, calls it a marital bargaining chip.

“Yeah, I sleep near the bad-guy door, where if the burglars come in you have to fight ‘em off,” said Jim Faulkenstein. “Not that she thanks me for that. But when I say, ‘Honey, I want to go to the hockey game with the boys,’ maybe she will say, ‘Oh, all right.’ Subconsciously, she might think, ‘Well, he does let me have the side of the bed away from the bad-guy door.’ ”

When the characters in “A Touch of Class” decide to compromise and swap sides, they wind up in the middle of the bed, on top of each other. Which is, after all, the point of sharing a bed in the first place.

Birds & Bees is a weekly column on relationships and sexuality. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached at kellehr@gte.net.