It’s happened at least once to any student at Wash. U. After a night of passion/five seconds of glory with your soulmate forever/drunken-WU-goggles-influenced flavor-of the-week, you collapse into bed and attempt to pass out. After 20 minutes or more of uncomfortable turning, rearranging of limbs and positions more complicated than any in the Kama Sutra, you come to a single, universal truth: these beds are too damn small!
Following with the theory that students at Wash. U. can come up with a solution for anything that they care about enough to put some effort into, there have been various ways that the bed problem has been solved around campus. The first, and most obvious, solution is to simply move off campus, where you can independently decide what type and size of bed you’d like; but while this is an effective solution, it also seems to be circumventing the problem. It’s great for upperclassmen living off campus, but what about those of us still unfortunate enough to be sleeping in the anorexic beds provided by the University? There’s always the possibility of a futon, which is normally small enough for a dorm room but big enough to provide an alternate sleeping space. It’s not necessarily the most cost-efficient solution, but often has enough space for two (or more, if you’re lucky enough to get into that sort of situation) and is usually comfortable enough for a night’s sleep with someone close by to spoon with (or to be spooned by).
Another potential solution is somehow finding an extra bed and putting it next to yours, thus turning the average WU bed into a queen-sized sleeping space of epic proportions. The advantages are clear in terms of having enough room to sleep and being more creative with your pre-bedtime endeavors; the sole disadvantage is that unless you’re lucky enough to snag a huge room at the beginning of the year, your bed will not only be the focal point of your room, it’ll be the only thing in your room. And while a bed-centric room is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s a not-so-subtle signal for any visitors that you are/plan to/hope to be getting laid on a fairly regular basis (nothing wrong with it – most people just don’t advertise it quite that openly). The ideal situation, of course, is that someone you’re living with decides to get a futon, thus leaving an extra bed for your taking, thus leaving all parties involved with a happy alternative to the WU beds.
There are also certain things students do around campus that seem to aggravate the bed problem, most notably lofting. As a past lofter, I can testify that lofting your bed is a great way to clear some additional space in an otherwise too-small room; the odd, L-shaped room I lived in sophomore year and the lack of space on my side dictated that lofting would be necessary to have any kind of space in my room whatsoever. But I can also testify that a lofted bed can make for some interesting maneuvering when more than one person attempts to cram themselves onto the bed. A friend of mine who currently has his bed lofted remarked after a particularly turbulent sleepover that he feared for his life over the course of the night. This may also have been because of the decidedly unstrategic placement of a glass table just below his precariously lofted bed, but even without the table, a sleepover in a lofted bed is playing with fire on a level just below trying to defend that hook-up you’d rather forget from freshman year by claiming that you thought she looked cute in a frat basement or that you were too drunk to notice her lazy eye (trust me, there’s no way to avoid that mockery; just sit there and take it like a man).
The worst thing about the bed problem is the added strain it places on the already questionable nature of a sleepover. In addition to the question of “Do I really want to spend the night with my boyfriend of nine months/this dude I just met?” there’s the question of “Can I deal with his noisy breathing/snoring unnecessarily close to my ear for the next seven hours?” This question, and others like it, adds a heavy burden to the already stressful dating situation at Wash. U. (or lack thereof). Unfortunately, the problem is understandable from an administrative standpoint; each room is meant to house only one or two people, so, not surprisingly, each individual bed is designed for one person (and one person only). But as much sense as this “logical” explanation seems to make, think about how much more relaxed everyone on campus would be if each University student knew that no matter what bed s/he ended up in at the end of the night, there would be enough room to sleep off however drunk s/he had to get to wind up in that special someone’s bed. Better rested students are better students, and students getting laid are happier students; who wouldn’t want us to be better and happier?
Matt is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a Forum editor.