Inhabiting together : who gets a room of her own ?

People marry later because they cannot manage to house themselves. Then they move in together, and a question opens that nobody says out loud : who gets space, and who goes without. The conjugal territory, meaning the concrete distribution of square metres, hours and thresholds inside one home, is among the least discussed and most decisive terrains of life as a couple. Nothing here is about decoration. It is about where a woman can close a door.

Who gets a room of her own at home ?

Short answer : rarely the woman. Research on working from home has built up, since 2020, a convergent body of observation on how partners divide the space they live in. A study published in 2026 in the journal *Gender, Work and Organization*, titled "Gender and Space : Homeworking at the Dining Room Table", documents an unequal allocation of dedicated rooms : men more often obtain an enclosed office, while women work in spaces designed for something else, mainly the kitchen and the dining table. An article published in 2021 in the journal *Sex Roles* under the title "No Room of her Own" observes the same negotiation, and the same outcome, in households where both partners hold a job.

Available space, then, is not only a material constraint. It is a trade-off, and the trade-off follows an implicit hierarchy : one person's work is treated as interruptible, the other's is not.

This spatial asymmetry doubles a temporal one, well documented in Tunisia. The national time-use survey run by the Tunisian ministry responsible for the family finds that women aged 35 to 44 devote close to seven hours a day to domestic work, against less than one hour for men. A study published in 2021 by Oxfam and the Association of Tunisian Women for Research on Development (Association des femmes tunisiennes pour la recherche sur le développement, AFTURD), titled "Et s'il y avait une grève dans les foyers ?", puts forward a markedly higher estimate, between 8 and 12 hours a day, but its method and its sample were never made public :

it gives the order of magnitude of the problem, not its measure. A woman with no room of her own has no hour of her own either. The two deprivations hold each other up.

The Moroccan sociologist Fatema Mernissi named this logic long before anyone measured it : the *hudud*, the boundaries. Her reading of domestic space, developed in a body of work now considered classic and cited here as a conceptual reference point rather than as contemporary data, described the house as a system of thresholds sorting who may pass and who must stay. The threshold has moved. It has not disappeared.

Sleeping apart : rupture, or sleep management ?

Separate sleeping is now documented as a way of managing sleep, not as a symptom of marital crisis. A survey by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine conducted in March 2023 among 2,005 American adults establishes that more than a third of them sleep occasionally or regularly in a room other than their partner's. A comparable survey by the same institution in 2025 arrives at 31 per cent.

The interesting detail sits elsewhere. In the 2023 survey, 45 per cent of men report leaving the shared bedroom, against 25 per cent of women. Mobility inside the home, here again, is not evenly distributed. Going off to sleep elsewhere presupposes that an elsewhere exists, and that you consider yourself entitled to occupy it.

The separate sleeping figures

• 35 per cent of American adults sleep occasionally or regularly in another room (American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 2023) • 45 per cent of men against 25 per cent of women (same survey, 2023) • 31 per cent of American adults in 2025 (American Academy of Sleep Medicine)

These data are American. No equivalent survey exists, to our knowledge, for Tunisia, Morocco or Algeria. They therefore do not transpose. All they show is that an arrangement long read as an admission of failure is being reclassified, elsewhere, as a practical question : snoring, mismatched schedules, incompatible temperatures.

What research establishes about sleep and the quality of the bond

The link between sleep and the quality of a relationship is established, and subtler than it is usually made out to be. A systematic review and meta-analysis conducted by a team at Peking University, published in 2024 in *Sleep Medicine Reviews*, pooled 62 studies covering 43,860 participants. It establishes a moderate correlation between better relationship quality and better sleep quality (r = 0.34), as well as longer sleep duration. Marital conflict, for its part, is associated with poorer sleep quality.

Which way the causality runs remains debated : sleeping badly damages the relationship, and a damaged relationship makes for bad sleep. What the meta-analysis does suggest is that the decisive variable is not the configuration of the bed but the quality of the response each partner gives the other. Partner availability is associated with better sleep. Merely declared support is not significantly so. Sharing a bed does not produce intimacy. Intimacy is what makes a shared bed bearable.

Living with the in-laws : a conjugal territory on borrowed time

Across much of the Maghreb, the question of conjugal territory does not arise first between the two partners. It arises between the couple and the extended family.

Co-residence is receding, slowly and unevenly. In Tunisia, average household size fell to 3.45 people in 2024, against 5.5 in 1975, according to the National Institute of Statistics, which reads in this a clear nuclearisation of the family. In Morocco, the 2024 General Census of Population and Housing conducted by the High Commission for Planning (Haut-Commissariat au Plan, HCP) records 9,275,038 households and an average size that moved from 4.6 to 3.9 people between 2014 and 2024, with 4.4 people in rural areas.

These averages hide the essential point. They say households are shrinking. They do not say young couples live alone. In Algeria, where the occupancy rate per dwelling was estimated at 4.25 people at the end of 2023 according to Ministry of Housing data relayed by the business press, more than 1.3 million housing applications were still pending at the close of 2024. Plenty of couples marry and start a family inside the home of the husband's parents.

What living with the in-laws produces is neither uniformly endured nor uniformly protective, and that is what makes the subject hard to treat honestly. It offers real resources : childcare, pooled expenses, transmission, support in case of illness. It offers permanent exposure too. The couple becomes a subset of a larger set whose schedules and rules of use it does not set. The marital bedroom then becomes the only territory of its own, and is loaded accordingly : it has to hold sleep, intimacy, argument and withdrawal all at once.

The ethnographic literature on Maghrebi families identified long ago a concrete marker of a young wife's emancipation inside this arrangement : the day she cooks alone. Leaving the mother-in-law's kitchen is described as a shift of authority, not as a domestic detail. The territory is not symbolic. It is a cooking hob.

Does a shortage of space manufacture conflict ?

Probably, and the research is cautious about it. Work on housing overcrowding describes a plausible mechanism : being unable to withdraw prevents the regulation of emotion, and irritation accumulates for want of any way out of the other person's field of vision. A study published in the journal *European Journal of Population* on overcrowded housing and relationship break-up nonetheless qualifies that link heavily : neutralise the confounding factors, financial difficulty and tenure status in particular, and the association between density and separation weakens markedly.

The honest conclusion runs like this : lack of space is rarely the first cause. It is an amplifier. It turns a manageable tension into a permanent one, because it removes the material possibility of holding that tension at a distance for a few hours.

Does desire need a place ?

Treated as an object of analysis and not as a scene, desire within a couple depends on two spatial conditions that research on marital intimacy identifies regularly : the predictability of solitude, and the certainty of not being overheard.

The first points to a paradox familiar to couple psychologists : desire presupposes a gap, and a gap presupposes somewhere to withdraw to. A couple with no separate space at all loses the possibility of missing each other. The second condition is more prosaic, and more decisive in the Maghrebi context of co-residence : soundproofing, the distance to the parents' or the children's bedroom, the effective closing of a door. These constraints are almost never discussed, and they weigh heavily.

A methodological caveat belongs here. On this precise point, we found no published quantitative data from the Maghreb. It is a blind spot in regional statistics, and it would be dishonest to fill it with estimates.

Housing first, love second

The link between housing and married life is now explicit in the Moroccan data. According to the national family survey by the High Commission for Planning presented in 2025, 51.7 per cent of single people say they do not wish to marry, against 40.6 per cent who state that intention. Close to 39 per cent of those who refuse or hesitate cite economic and material constraints first, foremost among them the difficulty of accessing independent housing.

That figure deserves reading backwards. It does not say Maghrebi youth is turning away from couplehood. It says it refuses to commit without territory. Marriage without autonomous housing is judged, by a majority, a bad contract. The position is rational, and it is new.

The Sultane view

None of this is settled by a well conducted conversation between partners. A woman with no desk because the flat is sixty square metres and houses six people is not suffering from a communication deficit. She is suffering from a housing market and from a division of domestic work which, added together, leave her the corridor.

What the conjugal territory lets us observe is the spatial translation of relations decided elsewhere : in the price per square metre, in the barely one hour of domestic work men do each day, in the social housing quotas not granted to recently formed couples. A margin remains, and it is real : deciding explicitly, together, who is entitled to what and when, rather than letting custom rule by default. Custom always rules in the same direction. Negotiation can rule otherwise.

The Editors