Time – and relationship – management does not come easy

Last night I didn’t get home from work until nearly 8 p.m. Let me start by saying my apartment is ten minutes away from where I work. At 5 p.m. I clocked out, went to a house showing, grabbed dinner from Wendy’s, spent nearly a half hour at Giant trying to pick up a prescription, then finally walked in the door just in time to watch a portion of “MasterChef” before prematurely falling asleep on our couch while Awesome stared at me like I was crazy to be tired before 10 p.m.

The fact that “time management” exists as a topic implies that most humans have trouble with the subject. I am one of these humans. I get out my front door about three seconds before I am going to be late. I bought “Hot Buns” from an infomercial just because I don’t have time to wash and dry my hair every single morning. My deadline for this blog is usually Wednesday night and I generally write it on Wednesday night. I wash clothes about a minute before I don’t have any clean underwear left.

Since Awesome and I started our new jobs it’s gotten a lot worse. Our time together is limited because he tends to work afternoons, evenings and weekends while I work a regular 9 to 5 weekday schedule.

So between juggling my family, friends, looking for a house, training at my new job, household chores and other miscellaneous stuff, I’m usually falling asleep when he gets home, and he is usually dead to the world when I get up for work.

So it’s not really surprising to me that I had a full-on genuine hormonal crazy girl moment this week where I cried long and hard for basically no reason at all except stress and anxiety. Awesome got home from work at 11:30 p.m. and I wanted to go to bed. He mentioned that he was going to stay up because he wasn’t really tired. In regular world, this wouldn’t really bother me, because it would mean that I get to use the entire bed until he comes in at 2 a.m. or so. In time-management-challenged crazy Emily world though, this meant our relationship was doomed.

Of course I tried to hide this from him. But when he came in to kiss me goodnight he sensed something was wrong and him asking me if I was OK opened the floodgates. I blubbered incoherently for five minutes while Awesome patiently waited for me to gather myself.

In between gasps and sobs I explained that I was upset because we “don’t wake up or go to sleep together anymore.”

Which is not true, but when you are a blubbery snotty emotional mess, your boyfriend agrees with anything you say because he doesn’t want to upset you more.

The best part of this whole situation was Awesome. He just held me while I cried, and once I calmed down, he made a point of saying that while our time was different now, we do still spend time together and will continue to do so.

By the time he was done talking to me I didn’t feel 100 percent, but I felt much better.

I can chalk my minor freak out up to the stress of being at a new job and not managing my time as well as I should be. Since then I’ve been fine. But I’m guessing I need to buy a day planner.

Emily Campbell

Emily Little (nee Campbell) was a perpetually single girl who recently met and married her Mr. Right. Her blog, Dating Emily, has been a two-year diary of her adventures in relationships. Her life of bar-hopping and casual dating has turned into one of dog-walking, craft-making and budgeting for eventual home ownership. But just because she can make a mean casserole doesn’t mean her adventures are over. As she prepares to become a first-time homeowner and eventually, a mom, she is discovering that the adventure may just be beginning.