Tempur Sexy

Warning: the following column is a bit risqué. Continue on at your own risk!

My wife Jody and I recently decided to buy a new bed. After 20 years sleeping on the same mattress, we thought it was time to upgrade. We had our eye on a bed from an Israeli company called Hollandia that slides up and down so you can adjust how you sleep (head and legs slightly raised) and also sit up in bed to read more comfortably.

But the main feature of the bed is the mattress, made from Tempur, a type of “memory foam” that conforms to your body and is supposed to help with back problems while providing a truly luxurious sleep. The saleswoman at the store boasted that it was developed by NASA and was used for the beds in space. In the U.S. it’s sold under the brand name Tempur-Pedic.

It was pricey for sure but we felt that since one spends 1/3 or more of the day in bed and what with our 20th wedding anniversary coming up, we had the right to a little pampering. We ordered the bed and waited for delivery.

At just about the same time I discovered an innocuous little website called Thisisby.us. The site allows authors to submit articles, then readers comment and rank them. The site splits advertising revenues with the highest ranked articles.

The top article the day I looked at the site was entitled “Tempur-Pedic beds and sex do not mix.”

Huh?

The paragraph that concerned me most went like this: “Having sex in our bed is very, very difficult. You need to have well laid out plans, several backups, and a safety line in case of emergencies.” The article continued on, explaining that sex on a memory foam mattress is like “making love on quicksand” and that it takes “more effort and energy that could be used for other more pleasurable things.” The foam also heats up which makes for a sweatier session.

I won’t go into any further details, but the article had a whopping 31,340 views, 54 comments and 120 votes. A quick check on Google revealed 272,000 results on the keywords “Tempur” and “sex.” That’s a lot of discussion for a topic a few minutes before I didn’t know even existed.

A quick peruse revealed that most people felt that memory foam did indeed impede their sex life while a small minority like “Mike P” on the ApartmentTherapy blog responded that “sex is better with this mattress…and so is the sleeping afterwards.”

Now, relying on comments from Internet forums isn’t always the best way to go about making an important and expensive decision. Fortunately, we had friends who had also bought a Tempur bed from Hollandia. The question was: how would we ask them about such an intimate issue?

Jody had no problem. She jumped right in and got a straightforward if slightly embarrassed answer from the wife. A few hours later, the husband called us while we were in the car. We put him on the speakerphone. “So you want to know about our sex life?” he asked and then laughed. He was very forthcoming.

Perhaps a little too forthcoming.

“Would you like to try it out?” he asked “We’ll be away this weekend.”

We declined. That seemed a little too weird.

We called up our salesperson. We told her that we were uncomfortable having a discussion with someone who was essentially a perfect stranger, but we had to ask. “Don’t worry,” she replied after hearing our plight. “With Israelis, there’s no such thing as a private question. Believe me, if there was a problem, I would have heard about it.”

We went back into the store. We bounced around on the bed in as many positions as we could get away with without alerting store security. We lay down on mattresses with different depths. We were very methodical.

In the end, we decided to go through with the purchase and buy the bed. If it didn’t work out, our salesperson reassured us, we could swap the mattress for something more traditional. “We want satisfied customers,” she quipped.

We’ve had the bed about a couple of months now. It’s a little squishy but not too hot. I don’t sleep particularly better but my back doesn’t hurt as much. As for the sex, well…after a whole article talking frankly about the subject, did you really expect me to kiss and tell in the end? Suffice it to say that a couple of our friends are already asking