The Silent Bed

An Unmet Need

Mattress stores abound. Wherever you go, you see them, especially in the suburbs. I’ve always been puzzled by their ubiquity. Who are the buyers? Mattresses last for decades; mine is about thirty years old. Buying a mattress isn’t a yearly event nor an impulse purchase; a decent mattress and frame will set you back at least a thousand dollars, and usually much more. Yet even though half of all mattresses are bought online, mattress stores are everywhere.

With all this selling of mattresses and bedframes (box springs, too), there remains a huge unmet need. The industry doesn’t seem capable of fulfilling this need, although the technology is surely not forbidding. I am talking about the need for a silent bed, one that doesn’t creak, squeak, or groan with the rhythm of the thrusts. I am talking about fornication.

Linguistic aside: I thought “fornication” was a synonym for “fucking,” but it turns out “fornication” is the “voluntary sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons or two persons not married to each other.” So let’s bring in the married couples, too, because surely they need the silent bed more than anyone. They don’t want Noah and Amelia pounding on the door saying, “Mommy? Daddy? What’s going on?”

Mommy and daddy are also put off by the bed-sounds and must sometimes turn to quieter ways of expressing their lust and affection. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Remember our student years, when many of us slept on mattresses on the floor? We may have worried about pregnancy, STDs, and “Will you still love me tomorrow?” But we didn’t worry about letting our housemates know what we were up to. The mattress on the floor was our silent friend (as is the trifold today).

But as we mature, we prefer some elevation, we prefer some support, and so we buy bedframes and box springs for our mattresses. With these additional elements, noise is somehow added to the mix, and it becomes hard to make love without advertising it beyond the bedroom door. Hosts and guests alike worry about disturbing each other. After the first couple of clicks and clanks, sometimes the guests will descend to the rug in order to satisfy their passion without alerting, upsetting, or inflaming their hosts.

Whenever there’s an unmet need, there’s an economic opportunity! So I challenge mattress companies to come up with a silent bed. It shouldn’t be hard! If humans can walk on the moon, surely engineers can design a mattress/boxspring/bedframe combination that is comfy and quiet. Maybe the bedframe is covered in wool. Maybe the box spring uses plastic, not metal. Maybe the boxspring and mattress are a single unit. Don’t ask me: I’m only a writer! But from my vantage point (admittedly, one of ignorance) it seems like an easy design project. So let’s go, Sealy, Serta, and even Avocado.

I imagine the product testers will have fun!

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Regular readers of this Substack may remember that two weeks ago I wrote a post extolling the sounds of silence. (The quiet bed is just an extension of this.) I am now visiting my oldest son, who lives a couple of miles outside Nevada City, and yesterday, on his brick patio, I listened hard and couldn’t hear a thing. Not a bird, not a bug, not the wind through the trees. I was overjoyed and called my husband to come out so he could experience Silence, too. As befits his relative youth, he has much better hearing than I do.

“Can you hear anything?” I asked.

“Well, I hear a shot from the shooting range down the road. And I can hear the leaves rustle.”

I didn’t hear the leaves, to say nothing of the gun shot. (Gun shot!) This led me to think there may be an advantage to growing old—and, frankly, there aren’t all that many.

Quiet and even silence are easier to access when you don’t hear very well.

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If you have a quiet bed, please let me know in the comments!

Photo by Sonnie Hiles on Unsplash