My gf (1 year relationship) moved in my small studio last year, due to the mutual benefits we had from living in the centre of our city. She previously lived with one of her friends in another city and had to do all of the traveling which was super inconvenient. Plus, we would spend much more time together.
Since she did, a subject of fighting I would have never suspected became constant drama. She’s a night owl, and I’m a heavy sleeper/early bird, meaning I have to close my eyes for about 7h, and sleep about 6h30, preferably around 1am or so. I have to respond to a strict schedule, because where I live, medical exams are really difficult and learning require a heavy workload. For context, the average student studies around 10 hours per day, every day.
We’ve had some difficult times finding “us time” in that schedule, and I take the blame for being too anxious about not working and wanting to shorten some “us time” when exams are coming up, and also not having enough “quality time”, meaning going out, going to see friends, playing outside… (keep in mind, we are broke students, so going out to eat is not something we can afford on a daily basis). What I did was that I divided work and private life as much as I could, meaning I changed up where I study from my appartement to the library (7:30am – 8:30pm), came home to do my assigned chores (30min or so), and finally spend time together (about 2 to 3 hours). But that tightly made schedule falls appart almost every two days : around 0:30am, I will be really exhausted, my eyes will start to close on they’re own, and that’s when she’ll be asking for more time together, for every reasons she can find.
I started saying yes to bouts of 15 to 20 mins here and there, which led to bouts of 30 to 45 min, and last month, it was about 2 hours. Clearly I have a struggle with boundaries, and she uses various tools to get me to feel anxious about going to sleep : getting upset, arguing, not looking at me, not letting me talk, saying I don’t care about her, crying, the silent treatment… so much so that I questioned the necessity of me putting hours so strictly in my schedule to get my things done. I compensated with lack of sleep for work (5hours, which leaves me with sleeping on the job, and not having any energy), or being late. I get up at that time because my mornings are where I work the best, and also now to have a good seat in my library.
About her now. She doesn’t have the same curriculum as me, and she has a lighter schedule. She can mostly get up at every hour of the day, but she prefers to go to sleep around 5am to get up at lunch time, except for work days where it’s going to be 2am, independently of the hour she needs to get up. She’s also, and that plays a part in the sleeping thing I think, really emotionally attached to me, she doesn’t see friends a lot, is pretty dependent on me to choose things for her, and is heavy on the fact that she wants us to go to sleep together. She’s the most empathetic person I know, she would sacrifice everything she could for others, and we share dreams and values about family, love and relationships.
We have talked about this issue a lot during the past month, and can’t find any agreement. She feels like we don’t spend enough time together to satisfy her needs for attention, hence why she doesn’t respect my hours. She also thinks that 5 hours of sleep won’t kill me and my work.
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So here’s my question : should I accommodate to her and get up later, while sacrificing hours spent studying without her, and having to study at home, creating some friction because she wants to spend time with me when I can’t, should I create strict boundaries about going to sleep at 1am, even if she literally will push me to make me talk to her, and throw a tantrum or invoke exceptional reasons (like a really big distress…), or is the problem lying in the fact that 10hours a day of work every day is simply not compatible with a couple’s life.
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TL;DR : My gf doesn’t respect the hours I give her when I want to go to sleep, using every thing she can for me to feel anxious about it. Work-life balance is hard to find, hence why she wants every single minutes she can to talk to me.
2 comments
You absolutely need more than 5 hours, don’t sacrifice sleep for anything. You should talk through your exact schedule with her and be open to suggestions she has for accommodations you can make. You can try studying at home but be clear that if it is not working that you will go back to doing it all at the library.
If you’re in med school and trying to be a doctor, how do you think this is going to work long term?
Your schedule as a doctor is only going to get WORSE as you go through more school. Your training is going to be longer hours. This isn’t getting better for years and years.
How do you think your gf is going to cope with this? Have you asked her? She’s not compatible with a med student. And she will not be compatible with a training doctor. Not at all. You BOTH have to realize this by now or you’re fooling yourselves.