Sleep/responsibility VS Time for your SO

[kittyxuchiha11]

My SO and I have an 8 hour time difference between us which makes talking a pretty difficult thing. She works and I attend college so as you can imagine our sleep schedule very much conflicts since 2am for me is the earliest she ever gets home. We both have 1 day off that we can spend together, but she normally uses that day to run errands and attend to other responsibilities, as do I.
This isn't me complaining however. This is me asking you guys what you think is more important: Getting enough sleep so you can function well at school/work, or sacrificing sleep and some responsibilities to talk to your SO?
just an open discussion for everyone to state their opinion

[Honour]

I'm in the same boat as you. My SO lives in AZ, 7-8 hour time difference dependent on the time of year. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint) he works nightshifts and tends to avoid sleep for awhile after he comes home from a shift so he can spend time with me, otherwise we'd practically never see each other. If I stayed up till 2:30am roughly my time I'd catch him before he goes to work and sometimes this has been the case when I've not been able to sleep, etc. I wouldn't advise avoiding sleep because without sleep you can't function at all.

[caesura]

I'm in AZ while he's in the UK as well. I go to college and he works, but we're always able to talk for at least a few hours during my days/his nights because my school has free wifi, more on days where I get home earlier or don't have classes.

Early on we gave up a lot more sleep for each other with varying negative effects for each of us, but over time we've eased it down to a kind of responsible sleep schedule, but now I think we're sort of moving towards an equilibrium to get as much time as we can without worrying the other too much about how it will affect school/work/health. I try to stay up to tell him good morning every day and talk to him for a bit on his ride to work, and he stays up as late as he can on nights where he doesn't have work the next day. He's had a weirdly nocturnal sleep schedule for the entire time I've known him, so I guess that it finally became useful when we started dating :/

[Unconditional]

Right now my SO and I have a 7.5 hour time difference. It helps that he usually works when I'm awake and can message then and he sleeps when I do- he does night patrols. However I will be working third shift soon so that will be an interesting feat. School and work are very important to me and usually I end up going to bed when I get super tired anyways, there's no possible way for me tobstay awake usually past midnight. He doesn't get a ton of sleep but he knows i love sleep and just cannot stay awake like he does lol. So usually I try to sacrifice sleep...but I just cannot however so it always ends up being sleep winning over him plus he usually tells me to go to bed anyways. I stayed up til 2am the past couple days and we were both surprised as hell lol

[snow]

In hindsight, I think sacrificing sleep was an OK thing to do, but sacrificing responsibilities and relationships wasn't. I could live off of 3-4 hours of sleep a night for those couple years, but sacrificing doing important things when they needed to be done rather than when I finally found some time to do them was definitely something I would change if I could do it all over.
Talking to your SO is important, but doing chores and making sure you're healthy is just as important.

[Moon]

I'm not sure it's necessarily the smartest thing to do, but my guy sacrifices his sleep almost everyday so that we can have a bit of a chat. We're 7 hours apart, I get home at 1am his time, and he works about 12-14 hours a day, and we've been doing this for, like, 6.5 years So, if you ask me, I think it's totally worth it, but then again It's not me losing sleep! Sometimes you need some sacrifice to keep things working well. I think you can compromise so that sleep is only lost on a couple of nights a week though, no need to be as insane as my boyfriend.

[AJG96]

My SO and I have a 6 hour time difference, and we seem to balance things out. I mean, he goes to class from 9AM-3PM Norwegian time, which is 3AM-9AM my time, so I'm usually waking up around the time he's getting back from class. As for my class schedule, it's scattered throughout the week. I get Wednesdays and Fridays off, so that gives us time to communicate through the day. And we both have weekends off, so we have time to chat 4 days out of the week. Some days we're busy, but it isn't too often. Over the summer, though, we would sacrifice sleep for each other. He usually sacrificed more sleep for me than I did for him. But, we have a pretty well balanced schedule these days. I wouldn't say it's a good thing to sacrifice too much sleep, but if you go to bed an hour or two later than you intend, it's not too bad.

[differentcountries]

We don't have much time difference (1hour), but combined with working at different times ıt can be challenging. I work daytime, he works a sort of all day long shift. In the beginning, we both sacrified sleep /errand time making to Skype with each other. For hours. As we both got more responsablility in our jobs, that became increasingly difficult. Also, him changing chedules in winter was hard, he would then finish his job after my midnight. Going to bed two hours later after talking to him dusrupted my sleep and affected my work performance. Which is why we could only really Skype on a Friday or Saturday when I had no work the next day.

[BaconGirl05]

My SO and I have a 15 hour time difference. That means when I wake up, he is usually asleep or heading to bed. When he wakes up, it's usually in the evening. I sacrifice sleep to talk to him at times. Like on weekends when I don't have work, I stay up till 2 am at times. Back in high school when we first started dating, I had really bad insomnia, so I lived 3 hours of sleep at most. This gave us plenty of time to talk, and I'd say that was probably the time we got to know each other best. My SO will stay up till about midnight talking to me at times, and I'll do the same on my nights. I think getting enough sleep to function is definitely important, so I try to still get my 8 hours of sleep in. I know I'm still able to function with 3 hours of sleep because I succeeded at getting A's throughout high school with little sleep. However, I would not deprive myself like that just to talk to him. Now that I don't have insomnia, I cherish my sleep:P

[SailorRei]

We have 9hours differenece here, and both go to Uni and have side jobs. So we never skype on weekdays, just 1-2h during weekends, given that I'm not out on parties, which leaves us 2 days to talk. Writing that I realised that I only see my bf face for around 4h every week that's sad

[staruletto]

I sacrificed some sleep for awhile and was staying up pretty late playing civ iv with my s/o (plus video calling!) and I accidentally slept through my alarm and woke up an hour late for work via a call from my boss. WELP. lol. No more civ past 11! It's so easy to lose track of time though....

[ChloChlo]

Although my SO and I are only an hour apart in time zones, I require a huge amount of sleep to function at my best (like 9 hours, at least). He needs very little (if he gets 4 hours, he's good to go). I have been letting myself stay up too late, sort of trying to "keep up" with him, because we can text, watch movies, and video chat for ages, and he goes to bed super late. I feel kind of pathetic when I'm nodding off between messages at 11 at night, because my bed time before I met him was 9:30! But after a few weeks (ok maybe months *cough*) of this, I'm feeling worn out. I seem to have caught two colds one after the other, and I've found I can't even enjoy the passion of my relationship, because I'm just exhausted! He'll be getting all lovey and expressing his undying adoration and I'm so wiped out my responses are really touching things like "aw nice, ditto". Ten girlfriend points!

I'm like a ten year old who's eaten too much free candy at my own birthday and now I'm sitting in the corner crying because I got icing on my dress and my mountain of presents fell on me. Ohh the tragedy!

I may need to implement a nap regimen.

[Wish]

We're both so busy during the day, so the evening/night/EARLY morning is sometimes the only time we get to chat and see each other. This in turn leads to some sleep deprivation and slacking on our studies, but you just have to be sure to manage everything!

[Ella85]

Im 5 hours apart from my boyfriend. But he works from 12-8 most week days. We'll talk in the mornings for a few hours. A lot of the time I have quite bad insomnia and even when I'm tired i can't sleep. So most week days we'll talk for about an hour after he finishes work and then I'll try and sleep. On weekends we will try and Skype but he is working this weekend and then I'm away the next. But we always speak on the phone every day. I'm spoiled. But I have found it worthwhile as we have some good talks before i sleep.

[Unicorn26]

I'm 6 hours ahead in the time zone. I find it works quite well as I can get stuff done though out the day before we talk. He's not a morning person AT ALL lol so it's usually 4pm before I hear from him, unless he's working day shift at the bar then it's earlier.

Since our recent visit we talk on the phone every day without fail. He finishes work 11pm my time and gets home about half hour later. On these occasions I will go to bed about 9.30pm and wake for his call. I prefer to do that as I can fall back to sleep much better after speaking to him than if I woke at 3am then missed him because he's out with a friend or gone to sleep early which he often does. When he works the night shift he gets home 10am my time so we always talk then, it's like he needs to offload before he can sleep. It not ideal but it works well for us, we are both happy and make the best out if it.

I have changed my sleeping habits for him, I do get less sleep now but I think of it as a temporary sacrifice as one day we will be together for good. When we were physically together recently we spent lots of time just chilling together which was so lovely. It was great to lay down together and chill, watching TV or movies.