The Confrontation
The hardest part wasn’t deciding to do it; it was telling my wife. When I walked into the bedroom and started pulling the sheets off our expensive mattress, she looked at me like I had finally snapped. “What are you doing?” she asked, her arms crossed. When I explained that I intended to sleep on the floor next to the bed to cure my back pain, she laughed. She thought it was a joke. When she realized I was serious, the laughter turned to concern. She touched my forehead to check for a fever.
“You are going to cripple yourself,” she warned me. “People buy beds for a reason. We aren’t cavemen.” I tried to explain the science I had read—about spinal alignment and natural resistance—but she wasn’t having it. We actually had a minor argument about it. She felt like my sleeping on the floor was a rejection of our shared comfort. Eventually, we reached a compromise: I would try it for one week. If I was still in pain, or if I couldn’t walk, I would go back to the bed and never mention it again. Deal.