Q: When I sleep with my partner, he places his face very close to me, so I am hit with exhaling carbon dioxide. I ask him to place his head away from me, but when he falls asleep he gets in close again. What can I do? A.H., Carnegie, Vic

A: At least he wants to sleep near you. Most long-term couples can’t get far enough apart in bed. They’ll sleep back to back, on the extreme edges of the mattress, with a giant, flimsy, Trump-esque border wall between them, built entirely out of scrunched-up doona, with a small, fluffy throw-cushion guard tower.

But your partner is different: he wants to be close to you, sharing his most intimate, stale, fetid exhalations of love; it’s quite romantic.

Though I understand this could get annoying after a while, being constantly buffeted by a warm, fishy squall blowing in from the tropics. And high CO₂ concentrations are potentially dangerous to the health: they can cause headaches and drowsiness in humans, and are commonly used to euthanise laboratory rats.