(we wrote this about myriad because we used to write humor columns and we wanted to practice. and honestly it is one of my favorite things because of what it captures about us)
My boyfriend and I have been together for over 5 years, which is why people are so often surprised to find out that, not only do we not live together, but we never plan to. This may have more to do with the deep and ominous growl with which I impart this information (“No we do not live together. And we don’t plan to.”) or the fact that they didn’t ask in the first place, but I choose to believe it has more to do with our apparent closeness. We have decided this for many reasons, our emotional health and need for independent separate spaces paramount among them, but it is also because of our many intractable differences.
A big one of these is time. We have completely opposing definitions of what it is to arrive to something “on time”. To him, that means arriving absolutely no later than 20 minutes before the stated start time, and for me that means arriving within 30 minutes of when it “will actually start”, or within such time as I can sneak in unnoticed, whichever comes later. So we have about an hour difference between our two time zones, a separation further compounded by the very different methods we use to calculate how long something will take.
I would call myself a time optimist. In that I plan my travel time such that, were absolutely everything to go as right and as smoothly as possible, and space-time to take a very small jump, I would only be about 5 or 10 minutes late. So my travel time is a little like time travel, but that’s how I like it; it keeps the air of mystery (“when will they get here?” “will they even show up?”).
My boyfriend is both more considerate and scared of being seen, so he isn’t comfortable strolling or even apologetically scurrying into a room late. As a result he is a time pessimist, meaning he needs to allow time for every possible disaster. Which makes him like a very specific and frantic super-hero. Even intense traffic, impossible parking, or both, won’t push him past the start time. Were the earth to explode, reform, and evolution to re-evolute such that we got back to exactly the same place with the appointment at exactly the same time, he would still arrive 3 minutes beforehand and consider himself late. He once called me in a panic from his car because traffic had made it take 45 minutes to drive 2 blocks and he was trying to decide whether to hang himself or just wait for the cyanide to take effect. He ended up arriving 5 minutes early.
Our differences are thrown into sharp relief when we try to go to the ballet. The many variably-sized time components - traffic, parking, and various navigation - become sources of major contention. This begins with the drive, which I always estimate will be “probably about 5 or 10 minutes”, regardless of where we are going and whether we have been there before. I also tacitly figure that they will be understanding and graciously hold the performance for us should I be a bit off.
My boyfriend, however, assumes that there will be at least one road wreck, possibly in which we’ll have to give cpr and/or provide legal counsel, and plans accordingly (you have to consider the time it takes to learn the relevant case law). He also assumes the performance hall will be covered by a cloak of invisibility and guarded by one or more trolls we have to fight to the death should we fail to answer their riddles correctly. Now, granted, he is the one who does the actual driving, while I have the more “uninvolved” role of being stoned in the passenger seat, but I am sometimes called on to push play in Pandora on his phone, so I consider it a pretty equal split.
Then comes parking, I consider a minute to be a generous allotment, since I assume that there will be an easy and available space ready for us, perhaps even with a sign (handwritten of course, I’m realistic) bearing our names. My boyfriend disagrees, insisting on 20 minutes, because, he argues, were there even such a space, it would surely be a trap set by the trolls and we would be fools to fall for such an obvious attempt to make us late. He also wants to leave time to defuse whatever trap they may or may not have left in our car.
So negotiations usually take the form of me asking when the latest possible time he could leave without wanting to kill himself and him giving me a careful and conservative estimate knowing that I will only hear the latest time named. There is no room for ambiguity in these situations. Time and catastrophe have taught us that we have to use concrete numbers to avoid misunderstanding. We once almost didn’t speak for an entire performance over a 7 minute difference in when we thought we were going to leave because we both had different definitions of “a few minutes”. My boyfriend insists that my definition was “0 minutes”, but I argue that, out of decency, he should at least pretend that isn’t the case. and anyway, 0 is still closer to “a few” than 10 minutes, which was his definition.
It is a perfect zero-sum game, as each minute later before we leave is torture for my boyfriend, while each minute we are forced to sit and wait before something is torture for me. So every minute must be given to either him or me, to ease either his mind or mine. In the end, we come to a number that makes us both as unhappy as we’re willing to be, and as happy as the other person is willing to let us get. As with any good negotiation, it leaves us both frustrated, resigned, and with the smallest conviction that we may have given in too much.
My boyfriend, as the driver, sets the final departure time. He may set it, though, but I control the weather. The 5 minutes before that are my time to shine. I sit in my chair, alternately frantically smoking pot and coughing maniacally because I am also trying to find my shoes and eat something. I have also by default laid claim to the few minutes after our departure time, since they are almost always spent by me exclaiming that I forgot my cell phone, wallet, keys, jacket, and to go to the bathroom, scurrying back and forth from the door while apologizing profusely and insisting that I am not being passive-aggressive. My boyfriend calmly states that this is why he likes to leave early, while I cling to my deeply-unproven belief that none of this would happen if we left later.
This is at the root of both our approaches: a conviction that things will be inescapably worse if we spend more time waiting to leave, or more time waiting after we get there. We are both, I guess, chasing the right “time”, in opposite directions but tied together. I like to think that the tugs we feel in the opposite direction give us some pause in our own. I do find that I now sometimes consider getting somewhere early, even if he isn’t there. and I like to imagine that he sometimes gives himself another 30 seconds before leaving, and subtracts a troll or two from his estimate.
NOTE: My boyfriend would like to make it clear that he does not expect any trolls, has never even mentioned them before, and anyway he is perfectly capable of outsmarting them if it comes to that. But he doesn’t expect them to give up so easily.
