I am a mom, a team leader and a cycling instructor. Some days, I wake up at 4 and go to bed at 10, some days I sleep til 6 and stay up til midnight. All days are varying levels of busy. This isn’t a humblebrag, you’re busy too. We all are. But what happens when your busy conflicts with your significant other’s busy, significantly reducing time spent together?

We work and sleep on almost opposite schedules, and it’s one of the best parts of our relationship.

Opposite schedules help you:

Value your time together
Be whole and autonomous
Communicate better
Develop intuition

opposite schedules help you make the most of your time together

You are only together 4 nights a week, and by the time you’re together the sun is down and 90% of the country has already eaten dinner.

An average Friday looks something like this:

You get a few hours together at a time, and if you’re lucky, a shared day off once a month.

At first, you question your sanity and if this even qualifies as a real relationship. How can you build an unbreakable bond without regular Netflix and chill, shared routines and banalities, weekend adventures?

The few hours you have are mostly yours, but the time is shared with other must do things - trips to CVS, the grocery store, the doctor, the car dealership. You bond through the boring shared experiences by making them more than the thing that you’re doing. Each is an adventure, another first date.

Less time is a forcing function for intense focus. This is a phones down, eyes up, deeply attentive space. Be here now.

With more attention, you savor each moment completely, so in it that the fire burns long after you part ways. This light sustains you when you’re apart midweek or alone on the weekend.

opposite schedules make you whole

You are alone on the weekend. You make a choice to be lonely and sad or lonely and lucky, grateful for the feeling of absence. Gratitude outshines loneliness and gives you the joie de vive to enjoy everything else that you can. With opposite schedules, you are forced to be whole on your own.

You live your life independently without filtering every plan and decision through another person. You get to enjoy your Carrie Bradshaw, eating-crackers-in-your-underwear moments. This can create problems when you are together because you’re so used to being autonomous you don’t know how to be interdependent but you practice.

You find fulfillment on your own. Nothing and no one else can really make you happy. Things change, people change, and although the whole world’s got your back, each person on this planet is playing their own game.

The people who see you and celebrate you and stand by your side are your happiness cheerleaders, but how good the game feels and how much you score depends entirely upon your own fulfillment practice.

You strengthen your own values, interests, and relationships. You understand what matters to you outside of “we.” You get to do things for your partner, and you do them with joy because the act of service is almost as great as being with them.

You contribute more fully to your relationship by being a whole human. You are ok on your own.

opposite schedules force you to communicate better

Previous relationships have felt at times like the light is on but no one is home. Relationships don’t get better through the act of being together, they get better through work. And what is that work?

Communication is the number one problem couples face. It leads to fights, falling out, splitting up and divorce. Being apart for extended periods makes you get better at communicating intentionally. You write words down on paper, you send epically long texts and you pick up the phone to relearn the lost art of phone conversation.

You think about what you want to communicate, why you want to communicate it, and how the other person is going to receive it.

You reach out when you’re thinking about them but become more intentional about staying in touch and communicating openly too.

You send a good morning text when you get out of bed before them. “We aren’t waking up at the same time, but here’s how I’m feeling about you this morning.”

You checkin to make sure that they’ve consumed calories because sometimes they’re busy and really bad at that, you let them know how excited you are to see them because part of the fun of it all is the anticipation.

With opposite schedules you communicate more and better. Every day is an opportunity to fall deeper in love.

opposite schedules help you develop your intuition

There isn’t enough time together to wax poetic about all of your woes and successes; you don’t want to spend so much energy focused on your external worlds that you can’t enjoy the time together. This requires either very direct communication or better intuition.

Direct communication is hard because to share what you’re feeling, you have to know what you’re feeling. Not just what you think you feel but how you actually feel. If you’re crazy busy, running around all the time, you probably don’t catch up with yourself for long enough to know how you’re feeling to communicate that to someone.

You become good at saying I want ice-cream or wine or a backrub, and your partner becomes good at reading between the lines to understand what that means, and vice versa. You read your partner’s body language, their tone, their eyes to see where their energy is:

in outer space, distracted, mindlessly winding down from all of the things that happened in their day and/or week before you reunited
in their head, focused on the argument they had at work or the email/text they want/need to send to actually be present with you
in their heart, looking at you in the eyes, trying to connect
in their body, connected

You see it, but they don’t see you seeing it. It is up to you to help them come back to common ground. They can’t do it on their own, not with the time you have.

Direct communication and intuition help you get better at grounding each other faster, without getting space sickness.

Living on opposite schedules can suck, or it can be a catalyst for unimaginable love and joy. There are rarely day trips or picnics in the park, but you find time to get ice-cream together or drive through the carwash. You make the most of the little moments, you grow, you communicate and you learn to connect more quickly and fully. And that is more than enough.