Late Monday evening/early Tuesday morning, my boyfriend emailed me a GQ article entitled, “F@*# Top Sheets,” while lying next to me in bed. It was the next move in our perpetual battle surrounding whether or not to make our bed with a top sheet, and it was a stupid one, because he apparently forgot that I work at a website too, ya fuck.
Among other arguments like, “Your subconscious hates the top sheet,” writer Maggie Lange suggests that the top sheet is only good for is getting tangled up at the bottom of the bed and giving “the illusion of a cleaner bed space.” Once you emerge from this illusion, you realize that “you can wash your duvet cover whenever you want.”
I don’t know about Lange, but I am not the King of England. I do not have the luxury of being able to wash a duvet whenever I want—no less, wash it on Monday and Friday as Lange suggests. This might be conceivable in the country where everyone has an in-home washer-dryer, but not in the streets of New York City, where I have to walk three blocks and fake-read a Kindle for two hours if I want to not sleep on bare mattress that night. Your girl does not live in a fantasy world. Top sheets are for realists.
Why to use a top sheet, compiled by the top sheet-loving Jezebel staff:
- They keep your comforter cleaner
- Sheet texture as opposed to duvet texture
- If your duvet is too hot, you can kick it off without being exposed to air
- It’s unreasonably hard to change duvet covers
- It makes you feel like you are in a hotel, not your crappy bed
- If it gets crumpled, you can remake the bed
- You have them, so you should use them
- We are not monsters
Lange proposes that top sheets have good alternative uses: we could use them to fashion a movie screen for a projector or a toga for a toga party. However, I have a television, and I don’t respect ancient Rome.
Image via Joey Chung/Shutterstock.
