I’ve always been a night owl - I basically come to life in the evening, typically experiencing peaks of creativity and sociability late in the evening or even at night. For instance, I wrote almost all of my Master’s thesis in the middle of the night, when my brain simply seems to function best. Socially, my favorite pastime consists of informal get togethers extending into the wee hours of the morning. On the flip side, I’m basically a mute ogre in the mornings, almost independently from the actual amount of sleep I’ve had. Mornings are something I just wish would be over really fast. I may be rested, but I’m not having (real) fun.
I’ve been seriously dating a woman who is a polar opposite of me with regards to sleep patterns / circadian rhythms. She wakes up, full of smile & efficiency, at 6 AM. at the latest, regardless of work schedules. Recently she confessed to me that hanging out with me messes her rhythms badly. When I’m just getting warmed up, she needs to go to bed (at 10 PM). When we’ve been together for a week, she needs two weeks to recover. I was taken aback hearing this.
I’m starting to think something as petty as this might just be a dealbreaker, to both of us. I’ve so far only been in relationships where any possible gap in the sleeping schedules was not as conspicuous as in this case. I’ve been the way I am ever since I was a small kid, and I just love the late night hour, innovating, talking, playing music, drinking, watching movies etc. Night time is the best time, for me. Going to bed at 10 p.m. is utterly alien to me, and would feel like I’m chucking away the best hours of the day. Whenever I’ve been forced to take up a true early bird schedule, I’ve accomodated, only to inadvertently return to my own ways at the first chance.
I’d like to hear people’s experiences concerning relationships where the innate daily rhythms of the partners are drastically different. How big a deal is it? How do you compromise? Any success stories of early birds and night owls finding a common way?
Right now we have a baby, so all this has gone to hell, but I am going to talk about the old, pre-baby life. With a baby, we just both do what needs doing and natural rhythms are irrelevant.
My husband and I are exactly like this, but it generally works out well. We both really like to have huge chunks of time by ourselves, and our different schedules accommodate this. I love, love, love the wee hours of the morning when the house is perfectly quiet and it’s just me and my coffee and the internet or my book or my work. He feels the same thing about those late hours.
Now, there are a couple things that are true for us that might not be true for you guys: not only do we both really like alone time, we never really dated much. I effectively moved in on the third date. So we never really had to deal with trying to keep two households coordinated on a very different schedule and we aren’t the type of people that go out and do things: we hung out together until I went to bed, then he did his thing. I would wake up and do my thing until he got up. We also, from early on, started a routine where he would come tuck me in when I went to bed, and we’d snuggle and chat, and I would go crawl back into bed with him mid-morning when I could for more snuggle and chat. Even beyond the creating-opportunity-for-sexy-time implications, there’s an intimacy to lying in bed together and a certain type of conversation that only happens there, so we make a point to have those times together. Lastly, we don’t get judge-y about our preferences: if she’s going to think you’re a lazy slob for sleeping in, or if you are going to think that she’s really a wimp for crashing at 8:00 and a freak for getting up at 5:00, this won’t work.
My husband and I are like this, and we’ve been a couple for 30+ years, married for 21 yrs.
The only time it gets to be problematic is if there’s something one of us is working on that needs the other’s help. When we did our own taxes, he would invariably start to dig into it at 8 pm, when I was starting to think about my book and my bed. I can remember sitting at the desk or table while he was struggling with Turbo Tax, it’d be 1 am and I was near tears I was so tired.
His bugaboos are when I’ve got a farm project that needs a second set of muscles, because I like to start thses things early in case I run into problems. He’s not thrilled to be out in the mud at 10 am!
If we have something fun planned together that’s going to be early or late, we tend to suck it up better. He’ll get up earlier if we’re heading off on a long drive for vacation, for instance, and I’ll stay up late if we go to a movie or out with friends or something. There may be mild whining, but no worse
It absolutely can work, but both parties have to be willing to give a little. Just like with everything else in a relationship.
I was morning bird to a night owl for two years but, since most of the activities we liked to share took place in the afternoon, it was rarely a problem. We never got to live together, but if we had it would probably have meant a “hot bed”: he’d be coming from work (he worked the night shift, which was great for him as it fitted his natural pattern and paid better than day) just as I was getting up to cook lunch and head out. Both of us were perfectly able to roam around and do stuff without making enough noise to wake the rest of the house.
while it might be hard in a dating relationship it might be good in a live-in-long-term relationship; you get to enjoy each other some of the time but stay out of each others hair most of the time.
You need to have living accommodations that allow one person to sleep peacefully while the other one is awake, but if you have that, I think it’s a great thing. My husband and I are kind of like that since we had a baby. He gets up early (like 4am) to have alone time and, formerly, to give the baby her early morning bottle. I stay up late-ish (like 10:30pm) to have alone time and, formerly, to give her a last bottle before I turned in.
Both the morning and evening shift should do equal amounts of chores. If the night owl is all about partying and leaves the dishes for the early bird, theres gonna be resentment.
Babies are a round the clock duty, but from one year to puberty the kids are most active in the early bird’s hours. Make sure chores are still divided fairly.
My husband is an early bird and has a young son from a previous relationship. I’m a night owl. We muddle through because he generally gets up with his son ~6am and I get to sleep until 8-9am, especially on weekends. That being said, I’m usually more on-the-ball during the 6-8pm after-work block, so I do a lot of the parenting/household duties in the evening while he gets some couch-time. He’s been annoyed by my grousing about early mornings (he wants to be up at 6 even when we have no kid responsibilities!) and I’ve, on occasion, been irritated by him falling asleep at 9:30pm, when I assumed we’d have another 2 hours to spend together before bed.
That’s OK. I willingly get up to help with kiddo when he asks, and he willingly attends late-night events with me. I second the non-judgmental attitude. If I had to fight a perception of laziness because I want to sleep in until 8am (horrors! the whole day is gone!) it would never work.
Thank you guys for the thoughtful replies (hey, that rhymes)! I’m thinking that life with an early bird might work just fine, given the obvious conditions of reciprocity and communication.
my s/o goes to bed around midnight and wakes around 8 or 9 am for work every morning. i’m a PM line cook, and i don’t have work til 3pm. this usually causes me to go to bed around 5 or 6am every day.
I have always been a morning person, when it is dark outside it was time to go home. The best shift I ever worked was 5:30am to 1:30 in the afternoon. It felt like I had a full day off everyday after work.
But the thing is that you can adapt to any schedule provided you get at least 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep each day or night.
For the last 3 years I have worked 3 ten hour graveyard shifts, 24 hours off, then one 10 hour day shift followed by 3 days off. The 24 hour transition day is a bit rough but I take a 2 hour nap and then wake up feeling like it is a new day and just stay up as long as I can before sleeping for a full night. So I am a night person for 3 days and a day person for 4 each week. When I am a day person I still prefer an early night, when I work nights I have no trouble at all staying up.
My wife works two 12 hour days, 24 hours off, two 12 hour nights and then 4 days off. An eight day week so that the days she has off are always rotating. When her days off match mine we spend a lot of time together, the other times we do what we can to support each other.
This may sound like a crazy schedule but the money is very good and we get a balance of time spent together and personal time spent apart. You need both the have a successful long term relationship.
What johnpost said. He beds early, then I have “my” time. He wakes early, and has “his” time. The best thing I did was get wonderful earplugs, so I can sleep while he wanders about watching TV, and playing on the computer. The only time it doesn’t work is if we have to both be up early to go somewhere together. He needs about 3 hours to get moving. I am up and gone, on a normal morning, in about 20 min. So if he doesn’t get up early enough if we have to go somewhere, I am cooling my heels for what seems like hours.
With the caveat that I have never dated a morning lark, I really think it would be a problem for me, as I love to go to bed at the same time as my partner. If that is important to you, or if lots of time together is important to you, it might be a problem. I noticed that most people who said it worked for them seem to like alone time.
I’ve always been on a sort of ‘normal’ schedule. Getting up at 7 or 8 and then going to bed about 11 or 12 has been fine for me. I’m pretty much the same level of lucidity throughout the day. However, my ex-husband wasn’t the same. For him, it wasn’t unusual for him to go to sleep at 4 or 5am and then not wake up till noon. It wasn’t really something I was aware of until we got married and moved in together.
And to be honest. It drove me nuts. A lot of it was because of our daughter. I’d wake up at 7ish with her, and have to do all the parenting stuff while his damn ass snored away in bed. Any and all attempts to wake him up ended in failure and on the rare occasion he had to wake up early for an appointment or something, he was an absolute bear. He’d spend at least an hour complaining about how tired he was and how hard it was to wake up. I really began to resent it honestly. It finally came to a head when he started falling asleep on the living room couch and then refusing to move when I woke up. This went on for a couple of days and I finally blew up at him. There were lots of reasons for our separation, and his sleep schedule was definitely one of them.
Though, reading through the thread, it seems other people kind of just take it in stride? I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps I’m just one of those people who can’t stand anything deviating from the ‘norm’ in their home? Or maybe it was just him. XD
My wife and I are the same. I’ll still get up early, though - regardless of what time I go to bed the night before, the latest I allow myself to sleep in is 9:30am, and that is a rare occasion.
Read an interview with Barack Obama and they are pretty much the same - Michelle will go to bed around 10pm, and he goes to bed around 1am.
The stuff in bold gives me pause. You’re “messing her rhythms badly” and “she needs two weeks to recover”? You’ve “accommodated”? I think that whichever side “compromises” will feel some resentment - whether it’s her needing to “recover” or you “chucking away the best hours of the day”.
Does she get butthurt that you’re not going to bed at the same time as her, or does she (resentfully) stay up until your bedtime? If either is true, the relationship is probably not sustainable. But if she can accept that you’re on two different schedules, it might work. I just don’t see how you can find a “common way” without one of you resenting the other.
(I’m the night owl, BTW. My partner works 8-5, and I work swing shift and go to bed anywhere between 2 and 4 a.m. If I had to be on the same sleep schedule as him, I’d crack - like other people in this thread, I need alone time to stay sane.)
The childcare thing changes everything, as several people have already mentioned in this thread. Both types of people have to be willing to chuck their preferences when there are children.
I would guess that it’s more like, in a new relationship, she doesn’t want to be a party pooper and run out on him when he is clearly just getting started. When you are a morning person, you take a lot of crap from night owls when you go to bed at 9:00 (and yes, I know this goes both ways). So she’s been staying up until midnight and getting up at five, and after a week of that she’s physically wrecked, not emotionally resentful. So she needs to find someway to change the situation and wants to make sure that he will understand she’s not going to be at 9:00 because he’s boring and she doesn’t give a crap, but because she gets up at five.
Yep. My husband and I have a bad case of this (he’s the night owl, I’m the morning person) and whenever one of us tries to get in the other one’s rhythm, physically it’s very hard on that person (although we can do it to some extent).
When we were dating, I tried to move to a later schedule and it was really hard on me physically. I actually started having problems with depression and fatigue that just magically went away once I went back closer to my ideal schedule.
When we got married, there was some adjustment. I moved to slightly later than is ideal for me, he moved to slightly earlier than was ideal for him, and we still couldn’t quite meet in the middle – we eventually worked it out so that when I go to bed, he comes and snuggles with me for a while, and then he’ll go away and have his alone time. And I have mine when I wake up.
When we had the kid, it actually turned out pretty well for the first year or so of the kid’s life – he took the night shift, and I took the early-morning shift, and we were both as happy as is possible to be with a small baby waking up in the night – I think that part worked out better than if we had both been on the same schedule, though we were both sleep-deprived. Now that she’s almost 3, I take the kid almost every morning. I don’t mind, though, having this “special mommy time,” because a) I work, so this really is special alone time for us, and b) we’ve worked out “special daddy times” where I go out and have fun and my husband hangs out with the kiddo.
Not all kids: Littlebro, SiL and The Nephew are laters. Yours truly, Middlebro (aka The Proud Daddy) and The Niece, earliers. Both groups have been so since we were in diapers.
