Nowadays, we associate couples sleeping in separate beds (or, god forbid), on the couch with dead bedrooms and loveless marriages. However, the opposite used to be true! If you've ever caught reruns of I Love Lucy or The Dick Van Dyke and wondered why happily married couples maintained separate sleeping arrangements, read on to find out!
Medical Concerns
To get to the bottom of this question, we have to go way back to before the invention of television. For centuries, millennia even, communal sleeping was the norm for almost everyone except for the ultra-wealthy. This meant that entire families would typically sleep in the same room to conserve both space and heat.
However, things were different for the upper crust. In the Victorian era, couples maintained not only separate beds but separate bedrooms. Additionally, the explanation wasn't entirely due to stodgy Victorian morality as you might imagine.
Separate sleeping quarters weren't a moral issue—they were a medical one! Doctors believed that sharing a bed and, therefore, germs with another person was a recipe for sickness. Additionally, there was a belief that the stronger sleeper would "rob the vitality of the weaker".
To people living in 2025, this just seems like common sense. Of course, sharing a bed with a sick person is unhygienic. And, of course your partner's sleeping habits may keep you awake even while they have the best sleep of their life—especially if they snore.
That said, separate beds fell out of fashion in an increasingly modern world. By the time iconic sitcom couples were sleeping separated by a nightstand, real-life couples were snuggling up to each other every night. The danger was no longer physical hygiene, but morality.
Moral Concerns
In 1934, the Motion Picture Association began enforcing a set of censorship guidelines known as the Hays Code. Rocked by a series of scandals and wanting to set a good example for children, Hollywood decided to clean up its act, keeping actors and filmmakers on a tight leash.
The code was divided into two sections: "don'ts" and "be carefuls". Don'ts included profanity, suggestive nudity and sexual hygiene. Be carefuls included things like sex work, "excessive or lustful kissing", and men and women in bed together.
If you wanted to show a man and woman in bed together, you had to obey the "one foot rule". This meant that one person had to keep at least one foot on the ground while either kissing or in bed. So, if you wanted to have a bedroom scene, you could have one character reclining on the bed—fully clothed, of course—and the other sitting on it with one all-important foot planted firmly on the ground.
When television became mainstream, the Hays Code applied to it as well until it was formally struck down in 1968. With programs broadcasting to homes across the country, the need for good morals was stronger than ever. So, married couples, even those married in real life like Desi and Lucy, could not be shown snuggling.
Making History
However, this was not always the case. The first-ever sitcom was a 15-minute program called Mary Kay and Johnny which premiered in 1947. The show starred real-life couple Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns who performed the show live—including sleeping in the same bed!
Only one episode of Mary Kay and Johnny survives, so we forgive you if the name doesn't ring a bell. As television became more popular, the rules became stricter. Even married couples weren't allowed to share a bed lest the audience think too hard about where their children came from.
Mary Kay and Johnny may have been the first couple to share a bed on TV, but they were also married off-screen. The question of the first sitcom couple to share a bed on-screen but not off is a little more complicated. The Brady Bunch is often given as an answer, but that isn't true.
Herman and Lily Munster shared a bed....but they're not quite human. The same goes for Fred and Wilma Flintstone. The first real couple to share a bed who were not married in real life were Samantha and Darrin Stephens on Bewitched!
