first, I accepted that we wouldn’t be going to any matinees. Second, if the movie started at 7pm and 9pm, I’d tell him 6pm… that way, we managed to get to the mall and have dinner before the 9pm show. I’f I’d say “9pm”, he would have been at my doorstep about 10pm anyway and then we would have missed the movie completely.
If we were going to a place where it didn’t matter to be on time (for example to the beach, or to meet some friends of his for drinks, friends who were also always late) then I just adjusted my time to what he’d said. If he said he’d pick me up at 5pm to have dinner at 6pm, I got dressed by 5pm but didn’t go into “waiting mode”: I’d still stay on the computer, watch TV and have a snack if I needed one.
Lasted for two years like that, the relationship ended when I moved to another country.
I tell 'im indoors to be ready at least half an hour before we’re actually leaving. I’ve been doing that for years and I don’t think he’s worked it out yet.
This is the one thing that drives me nuts about my GF, complete disregard for schedules.
Somewhere along the week.-
-Darling, let`s go to X on Saturday morning.
.Sure!
Friday night-
-Do you remember the plans to go X tomorrow morning?
-Yes, let`s go to X in the morning.
-Goodnight
-G´night.
Snoring…
Saturday morning.
-Darling, wake up, let`s get ready.
-Hmmghangfragh…
2 hours later.
-Darling its midday already, lets go.
-Yeeeeeeees.
Finally gets up.
2 hours later
-Darling, shouldn`t you get ready to leave?
-Oh, just let me check this on Internet…
I`m sick of counting the hours pass by now.
-Sweetheart, its 6 already, its getting dark, and Ive been twiddling my thumbs all day waiting for you to go to X. -Oh, six already?, its late, let`s stay home.
Og almighty, can you look the other way and let me be an ax murderer for a day?
Im slowly starting to do the "Im going to X in half an hour" thing. Works well most of the time.
People who are on time manage to be on time unless there’s an outright emergency, and the more we have on our plates the more punctual we are. I know it’s not possible to explain that to a CLP (chronically late person), and yet I keep trying.
That sounds very strange to me, but at least you’re honest.
They take as long as you let them take if you are in control of your time. At any point you can choose to say “Sorry, but I have to go now. Let’s continue this later.” Yes, the other person might be unhappy - but as you’ve said you continually disappoint others anyway.
I decline to fuck off, but many things occur at a fixed time every day and other people do manage to be there for them. Sounds like you have a very bad case of tardyitis.
I agree with the other posters who say that you can’t change people. You have to either adapt or dump her.
One way to adapt would be never to meet her anywhere. If you are going to have a date, she comes by your home or place of business. If she is more than 30 minutes late, you leave without her.
Prolly easier just to dump her though. In my opinion, a chronically late boyfriend or girlfriend is flakey and disrespectful and is likely to flake on you in other ways too.
Also, if the lateness bothers you but you accept it, she probably will sense this and lose respect for you, which will only make her treat you worse.
I have worked as a programmer or a chess teacher for 34 years. (No fixed hours).
I’m puzzled by your reference to ‘scheduled public transport’ - don’t you have trains / buses / planes that run late or get cancelled?
I travel through cities and along major roads that get clogged.
But I still manage to be on time, mainly by setting out early / allowing for delays.
Are these hissy fits ever over punctuality?
Can’t you set a time which you feel confident you can make? “I can’t guarantee 8.00pm, but 8.30 should be fine.”
I had received some tickets to the opera and thought one of my coworkers might enjoy going with me. A week or so before the performance, I asked if she was free that evening, and whether she would be interested in attending. She was. We agreed to meet in the lobby of the Kennedy Center 45 minutes before curtain.
The evening arrived; I picked up the tickets and waited in the lobby. I fielded several cell phone calls from her about traffic and then parking difficulties and was appropriately sympathetic. When the show was about to begin, I left her ticket at the box office and took my seat. Fifteen minutes after curtain, she slid into the seat next to me.
After the show, she volunteered that even had traffic been light she would never have made it in time. “I was working late,” she explained.
Oh, well that’s all right then.
I could populate separate pit threads on the topics of
[ul]
[li]people who think it is acceptable to arrive late to live theater performances[/li][li]people who live and drive daily in DC and yet do not anticipate traffic problems[/li][li]people who think “I was working late,” is the ultimate get out of jail free card[/li][/ul]
But I won’t. Not now at least. Suffice to say, it wasn’t worth my coworker’s effort to arrive on time. I have other friends who know how to be on time to the opera. Next time, I will invite one of them.
I’ve come to the conclusion that “I’m ready” simply means different things to the two of us. Like you, “I’m ready” means I’m walking out the door. To him, “I’m ready” means “I’ll be ready to walk out the door somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes.”
I’ve had him tell me he’s ready to go when he’s walking around the house naked, looking for clean clothes. It’s kind of a joke to us lately. He says he’s ready, I fake anger and yell at him “How many times do I tell you that you MUST WEAR PANTS when you leave the house?”
Humor aside, it drives me nuts. Even when I let him pick the time, he’s consistently 10 or 15 minutes late. When he has to be somewhere - like a doctor’s appointment or whatever - he can do it, so I really do take it as a matter of disrespect rather than something he simply can’t do. It’s not just when we’re going someplace, either. It’s also when people are coming over. He’s notorious for waiting until the very last minute to take a shower, and then he decides he wants to sauna before the shower, so I’m stuck doing the last bits of cleanup/food prep/whatever by myself and apologizing to our guests that he’s still in the shower when they show up.
Lately, I’ve been trying to be more casual about the time we leave when it really doesn’t matter. When it does matter, I try to tell him “Honey, I really want to be leaving here at 5:00, not 5:10 - can you do that for me today?” and he grumbles and argues with me but will usually do it.
My girlfriend and I have our own houses. Most of the time I try not to care. I gave up waiting for her - if she’s coming for supper at 6 and isn’t there by 7, I just eat without her.
I did make it clear early in our relationship that there are two times I will “leave your ass at home and not look back.” One is that if we agree to meet friends at a time and place, we will be there on time. The other is if we are leaving town on a trip. Only a few times did she miss supper with friends - I just went without her and figured it was her loss when she came an hour late.
She recently showed up for a trip just as I put my suitcase in the truck and was locking the house. She started to get angry and I said, “You’re 15 minutes late and I’m leaving in 60 seconds. Be happy or be home alone.” She chose to be happy.
I refuse to fight about her tardiness nor listen to excuses.
YMMV
I have a really hard time seeing chronic tardiness as anything other than a form of disrespect. I mean, sure, a person might not understand that’s what it is, but once you’ve had the conversation that “this really, really bothers me, I feel like you think my time isn’t valuable and I should be happy to stand around waiting for you”, and they still do it anyway, how could it possibly be anything other than disrespect? Are they tied up at home, literally, as in lashed to a chair? Car broke down? Seizure? And “I consistently mis-estimate how long things take” sounds like just an excuse to me (in the absence of some cognitive disability); we all misjudge how long it will take to, say, get down town at rush hour. That’s why we (a) leave lots of extra time, to make sure we’re not late; and (b) make a note of how long it took, so that next time we’ll have a better idea.
I have a dear friend who is chronically late. I finally had to tell her, “You’re smart and capable; being on time is something you obviously can control. The fact that you won’t exert yourself to be on time when you’re meeting me is incredibly rude. I stand around waiting when I could be at home doing something else, if we’d decided to meet half an hour later, when you actually show up. But it’s not just the inconvenience to me that’s the problem, it’s the fact that this makes me really really mad at you. I mean, really mad. It ruins our outing and makes me resent you terribly. And I don’t want to be angry at such a dear friend, so if we can’t fix this I’m not going to be able to hang out with you anymore.”
Now she’s 5 to 10 minutes late instad of 1/2 hour, and that I guess I can live with; I just tell her a time 5 to 10 minutes earlier than I intend to be there myself. Her boyfriend says I’m the only one she tries to be on time for; I think that’s because I’m the only one who insists she make that effort. He puts up with it because he’s in love with her; I’m not, and I don’t.
This has become my usual tactic with 'im indoors. Instead of asking him if he’s ready because I know he’ll say yes and he won’t be, I just yell up the stairs “Have you got your trousers on?”
Not an SO but one of my oldest friends is chronically late I finnally decided to let him know what it felt like to be waiting around for someone, so I showed up 45 min late for a lunch. I still had to wait around for 15 min for him to show up :smack:. It just made me laugh on the other hand I stopped planning things with him unless there is a group involed and we can move on without him. I’m deffinatly from the school of if your not 5 min early you’re 10 min late.
I think for some people the tardiness is linked to a “Just In Time” mentality.
For those who haven’t suffered it, “Just In Time” is a management philosophy which tries to minimize warehousing space needed by ordering stuff to your suppliers so the truck arrives just in time so be unloaded and the parts it carries used, then the truck that has to carry away your products arrives just in time to be loaded with said products and drives away at the perfect speed to arrive just in time to your own customer. Very pretty on paper, but if any of the truckers has a bad tummy the whole Babel tower of just-in-time-ness comes down in a storm of dust. Many of the people I know who are chronically late are also the kind of people who’ll say there’s “45 minutes” between Tudela and Saragossa; it’s true if you’re measuring the time as “time between the Tudela and Saragossa toll booths, using the toll highway and with no traffic problems”, but not if you’re measuring “time between my house in Tudela and your house in Saragossa, including getting into and out of traffic, using the road and with Ye Olde 6pm-9pm Traffic Clot thrown in.”
20 years married to a “Late Person” (LP) and I’ve known a few others as well. It becomes somewhat manageable when you recognize that it is an illness of sorts. Think of it as like “I can’t do math” or “I can’t spell”. Sure, if you punished a poor speller enough they may shape up, or just maybe, the way they look at the world is different from ours.
My wife was late to our wedding (?!). I love her and don’t want to do the tough love kinds of solutions, like leaving for a trip at the exact time I stated, because I know she won’t make it. That’s like telling someone with a broken leg to keep up or else.
I’ve studied the problem for over 20 years…some observations.
LPs really don’t understand time like anal … err, I mean, punctual … people do. I don’t think they have that internal clock that tells them that 5 minutes have passed since their spouse just yelled at them. LPs use landmarks … “everyone is in the car waiting and yelling at me, I should get my coat.” “My spouse is doing the grumpy look again, must be time to go … now where did I leave my shoes.”
The same mechanism prevents LPs from accurately estimating how long things take. Have to drive 70 miles today? Well, we are taking I-95 and the limit is 65 there but I’ll drive 70 - QED, it will take 1 hour. And really, I’ll drive even faster than 70 so there’s no reason to get all weird at 1 hour before our appointment. LPs don’t have a “feel” for how long it really takes.
The behavior reinforces itself. LPs don’t like to wait (maybe because it seems like a long time to them?) If you are always late then the party always start when you get there. We always leave for the movies when my wife is ready. Dinner or outings with others always start when we get there; everyone else is there. Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t we all like to walk out the door and leave immediately for whatever activity we are to going to? LPs live that life and only have to suffer dark looks from a few prissy people who worry about 5 minutes here and there.
My advice to who must live with LPS (Late Person Syndrome) is to
a) Carry a good book
b) Get ready early - it signals the LP - then do whatever you want until they are ready
c) Have fun with it:
One of my sons (A) is a LP, the other (K) has a strong internal clock. K and I are always ready early and it is fun to watch my wife and A watching each other. We have little bets on who will be last out the door. You can see the mental wheels working as each watches the other for various steps in getting ready. It appears that each is trying to be the last ready at each stage but, I believe, they get clues from each other that it is time to do things (like get on shoes) by observing that everone else has completed those stages. Two LPs together can therefore be much later that two LPs getting ready apart and meeting elsewhere, for example.
With the additional information, I’d say you should go ahead and eat at 9:15. Then she can decide whether to be mad or not. Hopefully she’s rational enough that when she starts writing out her message board post about “My husband didn’t wait to eat dinner with me because I was two hours late and didn’t call, wah wah wah” she’ll realize that doesn’t make much sense.
You won’t be able to change her, but you can stop letting her control you.
Heh. I get this one, too. Or better yet, he’ll hover over me while I’m getting ready. “Are you done yet? Are you done yet? Aren’t you done yet?” I give him regular updates on how much time I will need to finish, and then when I say “I’m ready!” suddenly he has to check his hair, find his wallet, etc. etc. And I’m left standing there for 10 minutes.
To be fair, I usually am the tardy one, but the above happens nearly every time we go out.
Oh, that would have backfired anyway. He wouldn’t get to experience what it was like to wait around for someone because he never would have waited for you. He would have shown up late as usual, looked around the room, saw you weren’t there and gone home.
ETA: This is based on experience with a chronically late person. Either they figure they’re so late you left, or if they’re truly oblivious, they’ll only wait for two minutes but claim to have waited half an hour.
The only area in which I’ve had success with this is arriving at the airport early. Otherwise, we are late for everything and I’ve just come to the point where I try not to let it bother me. After a career in the military, punctuality is second nature. In fact, being early is a compulsion. Being late for work has always been horrifying to me and it sets a bad example, but I’ve learned to be flexible.
I’ve also learned that however long she tells me something is going to take, my rule of thumb is to triple it in order not to become frustrated.
When getting ready to go somewhere, I sit down and read a book or watch TV. After she has said “okay” three times, I know it’s about time to get up and leave. I learned that if I get up after the first time, it’s still going to be 15 minutes or so, and I’ll become frustrated.
It’s probably not that she is deliberately trying to piss you off. Some people have no sense of passing time, or how long it takes to do something. They genuinely think that it only takes a week to renovate a kitchen, or five minutes to get ready to go out for dinner, or ten minutes to prepare steak, baked potato and veggies. These are the same sorts of people who are a disaster in the kitchen, because they have no idea of relative cooking times.