March is Sleep Awareness Month, a campaign that seems . . . not super-necessary but that provides me the opportunity to rant like a prude, slightly unhinged bed traditionalist about all the sickos who choose to forgo a top sheet.
There is a moment (for some, that moment may be now) when it comes to your attention that some people don’t use a top sheet — the flat sheet that goes between your body and your blankets. For some, the realization is revolutionary and freeing. Those people are definitively gross.
While I suppose comfort is subjective, it boggles me how anyone could be against burrowing between a split pita of two soft, matching sheets. To line the underbelly of your blankets with clean, smooth cotton is the epitome of coziness; it’s up there with forts, hotel bathrobes and being under a huge umbrella during a warm rainstorm. If it’s a hot night, a top sheet allows you to push off the heavy layers and still retain that safe, covered feeling that is so essential to good sleep. And yet the top sheet is becoming an endangered species. Go ahead and bring it up right now, wherever you are, and watch the anti-top-sheet sickos come out of the woodwork. You’ll know them by the faux-“enlightened” tone in their increasingly rising voices and allusions to ongoing conflicts with their pro-top-sheet significant others (who, for the record, are right.) It’s only a matter of time before a pair of battling hashtags emerges, as this is truly one of the most heated debates of our time.
Here are the three most common arguments I hear from people who oppose sleeping with a top sheet:
“It gets tangled up/shoved to the bottom of the bed.”
What? How? What kind of wild thrashing is going on while you’re asleep? It’s slumber, not the unconscious X Games. But OK, fine; don’t use it. And hey, if bedtime is so violent that you’re becoming entangled in a 700 thread-count death grip, why not get rid of pillows and blankets while you’re at it, clearing out every obstacle left in the path of your nightly tornado of limbs?
“It’s European!”
Oh, aren’t you fancy. Please, show me your collection of nighttime berets and the molding baguette that you’ve been using as a body pillow.
“I’m too tall.”
I almost fell for this one. At 5´3˝, I considered that this might be an instance in which I wasn’t recognizing my reverse-height privilege. Not that you couldn’t just leave the bottom edge of the sheet untucked anyway (see: Seinfeld season 4, episode 1), but my feet have a good 10 inches between them and the end of the bed. Half-prepared to surrender, I asked my roommate, the tallest guy I know, at 6´10˝, if he used a top sheet. His response: “Jessica. Yes. Only a pervert wouldn’t use a top sheet.”
CASE CLOSED.
Perverts indeed, because here’s the thing: I know you’re not washing your blanket/quilt. You insist that you are, but you’re not. I GUESS that a duvet cover could POSSIBLY work as a substitute if it was laundered at an appropriate frequency (every 7 to 10 days), but be honest; you’re probably washing that once a month MAX. Which, I understand! Getting a comforter back into its cover is a pain in the ass on par with moving, and maybe even more of a physical struggle. It’s an endeavor I begrudgingly undertake every month or so myself, but my duvet cover is protected with an easy-to-wash barrier, whereas yours is a naked sponge, thoroughly marinated in all your body’s juices.
Coziness arguments aside, your body sheds around one million skin cells a day, garnishing a cocktail of oils, sweat, dust-mite poop, and other bodily drippings that are perfectly normal but pretty gross to wrap up in. My friend, who is still somehow ATS (anti-top sheet), has a story about how his dorm mattress had a dark vinyl cover, and at the end of the school year, he uncovered it to find a thick layer of skin-dust. Sheets are the underwear of the bed; and you wear underwear, don’t you? Even if it occasionally gets crumpled in the depths of your butt cheeks.
The fact that most sheet packs come in a set is evidence that I’m right, but go ahead; don’t use it. Be gross! I put peanut butter on hard-boiled eggs, so my authority on what’s disgusting might be questionable. But if just one sicked-out person about to move into their sheet-hater-partner’s house is able to use this article as support for bringing back the top sheet, I’ll sleep well tonight. Although, I will either way, since, you know.
