Like many of my fellow Americans, I have trouble sleeping through the night. My therapist insists this is nothing more than a bad habit I picked up many years ago, and that it will go away once I admit to myself that mommy isn’t bringing her little precious a bottle.

My wife, however, has another theory.

She insists I wake up during the night because I cannot resist having a snack before going to sleep. This is nothing more than my wife transferring her feelings because I can eat cheese and she can’t.

I suppose snacking in front of her, while at the same time fluffing up the pillow behind my back, is not the best way to change her mind

(FOR THE RECORD: Cheese is 100-percent safe to eat in bed because it does not leave crumbs—although the crackers might.)

I tried my best to gently point out the flaws in her logic, patiently refuting her emotional comments with quotes from the scientific literature such as, “Says you,” and “Tell me again when you got your therapist’s license.”

(FOR THE RECORD: These responses are 100-percent effective as long as you don’t use them for every argument.)

Yet, she persisted, despite my having four college degrees to her three. And one of mine is from an Ivy League school so it counts twice.

Finally, I relented.

“You’ll stop snacking?” she said. It was as much of a question as MacArthur asking Hirohito, “So you’re surrendering?”

I told her I’d look into it. Not exactly what she wanted to hear.

I have found that, after two decades of marriage, surprising your wife every now and then is a good thing, because it gives you something new to talk about…once you start talking again.

As it turns out, having cheese before going to sleep somehow wakes up the liver which, according to a serious-looking article on the internet, doesn’t like to work at night. Apparently, going to sleep with a grumpy liver is about as peaceful as dating a Gentile girl while living with a Jewish mother.

Trust me. I’ve done both.

As an American, however, I found the news shocking (about livers, not Jewish mothers).

Since when is being a body part a 9-to-5 job? What kind of a work ethic is that for a major organ? Are other organs in on this? Does my bladder have a last call at 2AM (that would explain a lot)? Was there a union election I missed?

I don’t want to get political here, but my liver ought to consider that there are more than a few livers out there, mostly in the victims of fatal automobile crashes, that would love to flee their current situations. They’d be happy to work 24/7 for three square meals a day and a diaphragm over their heads.

Plus snacks.

My wife did ask me the other day what I found out about my sleeping problem.

Rather than telling her that I needed organ transplants, making it sound as if I were minutes away from sharing a cryogenic tank with Walt Disney, I simply told her that the internet agreed with her.

In retrospect, I probably didn’t need to add, “for what it’s worth.”

The good news is I have given up the snacks. Just as I suspected, I’m not sleeping any better. That may not be my liver’s fault. Sleeping on the floor is not all that comfortable.

I’ll know more once my wife relents and let’s me sleep on the mattress, which I’m having trouble getting into the doghouse.