Being An Early Person Married to a Late Person

      We’re supposed to leave at 6.

      I am ready at a quarter to 6, sitting on the couch, waiting, waiting. My wife is almost ready, she says. It’s 5:50. And then she’s just about ready, at 5:58. At 6, she’ll be just a minute.

Then it’s 6:03 and then she needs to find her sunglasses and then it’s just about 6:05. We finally leave the house at 6:09, but who’s counting?

      I am, of course.

      I’m exasperated. She really doesn’t understand why. She’s fine. I’m fuming silently.

      This has been going on, more or less, for almost 60 years. I am an early person; my wife is—and she will absolutely deny this—a late person. She will say, instead, that she is, more or less, an“on-time” person.

      As we get older, our politics may change, our eating habits may evolve, our hearing may become problematic and our eyesight may dim. But once an early person, always an early person. Once a late person, always a late person.

      In fact, there is scientific evidence that this is the case. "It is likely that there is a mechanism inn the brain that causes some people to be late . . . because they underestimate the time it will take them to get there," Hugo Spiers, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and the co-author of a 2017 study in the journal Hippocampus told the website Live Science.

      The hippocampus is a region of the brain which processes some aspects of time, such as remembering when to do something and how long it takes, Spiers explains. Research suggests that neurons in the hippocampus acting as "time cells" contribute to our perception and memory of events, but why exactly some people perpetually underestimate time is unclear.v     

      A number of medical experts have labeled the condition “time blindness” and associated it with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or other mental health issues. Maybe always wanting to be early is also a mental disorder.

      For whatever reasons, my wife and I have been having the argument forever. She doesn’t see the point in getting anyplace early. Then you just have to wait around, she says.  I see all the problems that could delay us in getting to anyplace on time.

      If she is early, she is bored. If I am late, I am tense.

      I am inflexible about schedules and appointments. My wife thinks that if we’re just going to see friends, and we say we’ll see you at seven, that means “sometime around seven.” Don’t be so anal, she tells me.

      My wife plans to be exactly on time. That’s the plan. That’s the plan if everything goes right—if her sister doesn’t text her as we’re heading out the door, if she doesn’t decide to change her shoes, if the traffic is not worse than expected.

      I frequently arrive too early, sometimes because the traffic was much better than I feared, sometimes because I got dressed more quickly or because I just want to be the first person at the restaurant, the first person in line at the theater, the first person waiting exasperatedly for latecomers.

      On the occasional day that I am running a little late for something, meeting a friend for lunch or a dentist appointment, I get nervous. I know, of course, that there’s nothing terrible about being five minutes late, but I’m still nervous.  

      On the occasional day that my wife is truly on time and we leave when we said we would, I sometimes remember to compliment her. She thinks I don’t do it enough.

      We thought, perhaps, that smartphones might change all this. We could GPS our arrival time and know exactly when we’d get somewhere, and thus figure out how much time we needed; we’d know if there was an accident on the highway, delaying everyone; we could text to say we’d be there in five minutes; we could WhatsApp to say we’re almost there.

      But nothing, really, has changed. We remain still and forever, an early person and a late person—I mean an “on-time” person—joined by love, family, history and perpetual irritation.