Carson Daly has been with food blogger and cookbook author Siri Pinter for almost 20 years and married for nine years. They have four children together: a son, Jackson, 14, and three daughters, Etta, 11, London, nine, and Goldie, four. In the past, Carson has talked about their sleeping arrangements. First, they had a “sleep divorce,” in which they slept in separate bedrooms. Then, in 2022, Carson gave an update that he and Siri were back to sleeping in the same bed, but using different blankets. He called that a “sleep separation.” (Note: Mr. Rosie and I have had separate blankets from day one. I did not know that wasn’t considered normal!) Now, Carson is back with another update to his sleep saga: He and Siri sleep in different beds “several times a week.” Sounds like they’re doing a hybrid method?
The secret to Carson Daly’s marriage lies in his (often empty) bed. At the Today show’s Solar Eclipse watch event held at The American Museum of Natural History on Monday, April 8, the 50-year-old TV personality told PEOPLE that he and his wife Siri Pinter sleep in different beds several times a week — and they “both secretly love it.”
“The object is to stay together. That’s what we’d like to do. And so reverse engineering that, it’s like — by any means necessary, for the two of us, [we want to] still be in a relationship when we’re dying,” he says of how he and Pinter, who he met in 2005 and wed in 2015, approach their relationship.
They both have a “whatever it takes” mindset, he says, and part of that involves what he calls “sleep divorce.”
“It’s been good for us,” he admits. “We don’t do it all the time, but a couple of days during the week — especially if I want to watch an Islanders hockey game kind of later at night — I go into the guest room, she retires upstairs to read her book or watch a show.”
They part on a “Goodnight, I’ll see you tomorrow,” and Daly says “it just takes a lot of attention out and it works. So I highly recommend sleep divorce.”
Daly and Pinter, a food blogger and cookbook author, have been “sleep divorcing” since 2019. The idea sprouted while Pinter, 43, was pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, daughter Goldie Patricia.
“We’re both pretty good-sized humans and it just wasn’t really working when she was in her third trimester, and I also have sleep apnea, which is very sexy for the ladies out there, I’m sure,” Carson told PEOPLE in 2020. “She couldn’t get comfortable, so we were like a commercial you would see, kicking each other and just not sleeping.”
“We woke up and we just shook hands like, ‘I love you, but it’s time to sleep divorce. It’ll be the best thing for all of us,'” he added.
After their family grew from five to six, the couple continued sleeping separately occasionally as a new need arose. They’d relocated to California for Daly to film The Voice, making his wake up time for the Today show 3 a.m., so the former TRL host was “purposely not sleeping” with his wife and newborn.
“We’re still sleep divorced, but for discernibly different reasons,” he said, before admitting, “I don’t know if we’ll ever sleep together again.”
I love that Carson and Siri keep evolving their arrangement to suit what works best for them at any given time. However, I do hope that Carson helped with their newborn during the daytime so Siri could take a break and a nap. They aren’t the only celebrity couple who sleep in separate bedrooms, either. Cameron Diaz advocated for normalizing the practice last year when she explained why she and husband Benji Madden sleep in different rooms. David and Victoria Beckham and Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Falchuk have also said they’ve slept in separate rooms at points in time. Gwyneth and Brad didn’t even live in the same house when they first got married. I get it. Sleep is important! Get it however you need to. Sleeping in different beds doesn’t mean you don’t have a healthy marriage. Relationships can be as conventional or unconventional as you mutually agree upon. Diaz is right: normalize not following the traditional norms that define a happy relationship.
I’m sure married couples who could truly afford separate bedrooms would totally do it.
I know plenty of married couples who envy wealthy couples who can.
This exactly and why it’s always been common among aristos. After the “honeymoon” stage sharing a bed isn’t especially romantic. Although I dislike the phrase sleep divorce. Sleeping separate isn’t a sign of trouble, and IMO if you have the luxury to do it cuts down on any number of petty squabbles (the blankets, room temp, tv remote, etc).
SNORING!!!! I love my husband. We’ve been married for 22 years. There are nights that I go sleep in our (away at university) child’s bed because he’s snoring loud enough to wake the dead. When Kiddo is home, I have to deal with it because we don’t have an extra bedroom.
LOVE THIS. Let’s please normalise alternative sleeping/living/loving arrangements. If it results in healthy relationships, just do the thing! And talk about it so we can extricate ourselves from this antiquated idea of what a loving relationship looks like!
It cannot be underestimated how important sleep and privacy are! Definitely normalize this!
We use separate blankets, too. Our king is two twins on a king frame- I get my squishy side, he gets his firm side. It’s great!! There is zero blanket yanking 😀
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Separate blankets are the norm in Scandinavia.
Forget separate bedrooms. How about separate residences?! 🙂
I loved the setup Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter reportedly had with adjacent townhomes in London.
Yes to more stories talking about how normal this is! The main reason I want to finally convert our loft is to have a dedicated spare room with a permanently made up bed. There’s a sofa bed in the office but I ended up camping out under random blankets when I have to move in there at 2am due to snoring as the spare bedding is under our (ottoman) bed and I’m not going to move furniture and make it up properly at that time. Ugh.
Same, my partner is neurodivergent and needs things a certain way to sleep. We also have different start times to our day. The pets and I have our own bedroom. It’s worked for more than a decade and has no negative impact on our relationship.
My parents have slept in separate bedrooms for 15-20 years, mom moved into my old bedroom Their mututal snoring keeps them awake. Also my mom likes to watch TV to go to sleep in bed. It works well for them.
Definitely love having separate bedrooms. Snoring, different bedding preferences, different temp preferences, and just the basic need to have one’s own space. We cuddle in one bed every night before we retire separately, and it’s wonderful.
We often spend time in one bed or the other (with the pets) on lazy weekend mornings. It’s really nice. We randomly end up in each others’ rooms, so there’s no territorial aspect. The separate spaces is purely about sleep comfort and practicality and, like you, we find it wonderful.
Mr. Jaded is type 1 diabetic and he has an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor. Between the two gadgets he beeps and honks and rings to the point where I can’t sleep, so at the first sign of noise he decamps to the spare bedroom. Works for us!