My girlfriend and I are trying to call each other on Skype everyday. I'm in Chicago, she is in Bucharest, so I shifted my work hours to be back home at 4pm my time, which means midnight her time (I'll use her time, bellow, rather than mine).
The problem is that she is terrible at managing time, and managing sleep: she works a full-time job during the day, and in the evenings and weekends she works on a PhD, which means that when I get home at midnight her time, she isn't ready to skype immediately and always tells me she needs more time to finish something (this is frustrating for me because this time is pretty random -sometimes she calls at 12:15am, sometime after 1am- and I can't plan anything on my side. I just stay on Skype and scroll facebook while waiting for her. Her estimations of how long she needs are terrible, when she tells me "5 minutes" I can say it's usually between 20 and 30 minutes). She also doesn't pay attention to her sleep. Very often we Skype until 2:30am and after that she wants to keep talking on Whatsapp while in bed, sometimes until 3 - 3:30am (even up to 4am once or twice).
I love that we have such long conversations every day. During days where we cannot Skype, I feel very lonely. On the other hand, I'm upset that she stays up so late (she acknowledges herself that it has a bad impact on her health). That being said even when we keep Skype short she ends up getting back to working on her PhD and sleeping really late. All in all, I feel worried about her health, upset that she cannot manage her schedule better, and guilty that I am potentially one of the reasons she stays up so late.
Right now I'm thinking to set rules, like "we don't skype if she cannot make it by 00:30am", or "we stop skype at 1:30am", or "we don't stay on whatsapp beyond 2am". But my biggest fear is that those rules end up limiting our interactions in a negative way: what if one of us needs to talk more one evening? what if those time limits appear like times beyond which it becomes "not ok" to contact the other? Also knowing that we will skype when I get back home is what keeps me going through the day, so I fear that not knowing whether she will be able to make it will be even harder to handle for me.
I would very much like to hear if other have/had the same problems, and how you solved them.
The problem is that she is terrible at managing time, and managing sleep: she works a full-time job during the day, and in the evenings and weekends she works on a PhD, which means that when I get home at midnight her time, she isn't ready to skype immediately and always tells me she needs more time to finish something (this is frustrating for me because this time is pretty random -sometimes she calls at 12:15am, sometime after 1am- and I can't plan anything on my side. I just stay on Skype and scroll facebook while waiting for her. Her estimations of how long she needs are terrible, when she tells me "5 minutes" I can say it's usually between 20 and 30 minutes). She also doesn't pay attention to her sleep. Very often we Skype until 2:30am and after that she wants to keep talking on Whatsapp while in bed, sometimes until 3 - 3:30am (even up to 4am once or twice).
I love that we have such long conversations every day. During days where we cannot Skype, I feel very lonely. On the other hand, I'm upset that she stays up so late (she acknowledges herself that it has a bad impact on her health). That being said even when we keep Skype short she ends up getting back to working on her PhD and sleeping really late. All in all, I feel worried about her health, upset that she cannot manage her schedule better, and guilty that I am potentially one of the reasons she stays up so late.
Right now I'm thinking to set rules, like "we don't skype if she cannot make it by 00:30am", or "we stop skype at 1:30am", or "we don't stay on whatsapp beyond 2am". But my biggest fear is that those rules end up limiting our interactions in a negative way: what if one of us needs to talk more one evening? what if those time limits appear like times beyond which it becomes "not ok" to contact the other? Also knowing that we will skype when I get back home is what keeps me going through the day, so I fear that not knowing whether she will be able to make it will be even harder to handle for me.
I would very much like to hear if other have/had the same problems, and how you solved them.
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