Modern Love the podcast is supported by produced by the iLab at WB [Music] Boston from The New York Times and WB Boston this is modern [Music] love stories of love Lo and Redemption I'm your host Magna chakrabarti a lot of things can get in the way of Love distance money issues being in different places in life but this week's essayist Amanda gter writes about facing a very different kind of challenge her piece is read by Logan Browning she stars in the show dear white people which is just released released its third season on Netflix I stumbled across Justin's online dating profile while waiting for water to boil I had just gotten home from running errands ATM mailbox grocery store and was cooking dinner before sitting down to work it was just after 4:00 a. m. message me if you want to talk about anything and everything until the we hours of the night his profile said the phrase We hours as it turns out Out means different things to different people for him a software engineer with an eye for design who can whale on an electric guitar the we hours are 2:00 a.
m. maybe 3 for me it's a little more complicated I have a circadian rhythm disorder called delay sleep phase syndrome it's not insomnia I've never had trouble sleeping it's that that my circadian clock tells me it's time for bed when the sun is rising and time to wake up as it's setting as these things go I'm an extreme case a vampire basically offset from society's clock by approximately 8 hours my father is similarly Chrono challenged as was his mother as a child I struggle to live in the daytime world some children feel they were born into the wrong body me I felt as if I were born into the wrong time now as a freelance writer making my own schedule I have reveled in the freedom to live by my own clock going to bed around 8:00 or 900 a. m.
and waking up around 4: or 5 p. m. I've always Liv lived in cities New York Philadelphia London Boston yet my world is sparsely populated there are no lines when I grocery shop no traffic when I drive no phone calls emails or social media stir as I work alone with my books and my thoughts I write about physics being nocturnal isn't a requirement for physics writing but it helps the dark of night is perfect for contemplating the universe with everything silent and still it's easier to notice the cracks in reality's facade of course my chronologic Freedom comes with a few technical difficulties such as an inability to take calls from editors listen to music without headphones or remember what day of the week it is since my days are always changing in the middle then there's dating First Dates usually go okay because they're in the evening but complications quickly arise it's hard to explain to a date that you don't want to drink at dinner because you've just woken up and have a full work day ahead you Tire of saying you can't go to brunch or to the beach because you'll be sound asleep when they ask why you don't just go to bed earlier as if perhaps you'd never thought of that you have to explain that your inverted schedule isn't a preference on my first date with Justin we went to an art museum at 700 p.
m. where we spoke easily about our families and passions software and string theory I learned that he had a nine-to-five job not my nine-to-five the other one and enjoyed cycling and being out in the sunshine I didn't mention that I was midway through a regimen of prescription vitamin D administered in Blitz Craig doses Sunshine was not in my vocabulary for our second date it was my turn to make plans I know you're on a normal human schedule I texted him but the Percy and meteor shower Peaks tomorrow night want to find a dark spot and watch despite being a normal human he replied I'm totally down for that at midnight we found a cozy spot by the Charles River and gazed upward watching for the Stray dust of an ancient Comet despite the city lights we saw three meteors Blaze above the Boston skyline we talked about Starlight how it had begun its Journey thousands of years ago and and we were looking back in time I thought how in a sense that's always true my now is not the same as his and never will be there's always a delay each of us living in the immediate past of the other regardless of how tightly he wrapped his arms around my waist we are all trapped in our own time zones the best we can do is try to meet in an imaginary middle so that's what we did he booked us a trip to go night skiing I made it to the beach in time to feel the sun on my skin he rigged up a high-powered bike light and took me for a long ride in the summer dark I ate Thai food for breakfast he ate pancakes for dinner eventually however the constant compromise made for two grumpy blur eyed shells of human beings we were in love but exhausted and ready to give up resigned to nursing our heartache from the opposite side of a circadian rhythm he went back to his hometown in Maine to clear his head I returned to the night to live in mine one afternoon I. E just after midnight I got an email from him suggesting we try a new approach there is no world we both occupy at the same time he wrote it's an illusion we don't actually need to find that instead of fighting our difference he said let's just love each other from across the clock so we decided to move in together we found an attic apartment with tons of skylights where sunlight would flood the living room during his day and Moonlight would stream through the ceiling during mine we were still unpacking boxes when there was a total lunar eclipse and we pulled a lounge chair into the kitchen and watched as the Earth's Shadow slid across a terracotta Moon as a token of our new living arrangement I gave Justin an illustrated edition of the day boy and the night girl a fairy tale by George McDonald from 1882 snuggling on the couch we took turns reading chapters aloud to each other in the story a witch raises two children in captivity allowing the boy to see only day and the girl only night but one day the boy stays out longer than he's supposed to and when it gets dark he becomes terrified the girl finds him shaking in the garden and tries to comfort him explaining how gentle and sweet the darkness is how kind and friendly how soft and velvety since she's Wide Awake she promises to watch over him while he sleeps when the Sun rises he awakens to find that now she's scared a stranger to the Sun and so he carries her in his arms while she sleeps until dark Justin and I figured we would do the same when I repairman insisted on coming at noon Justin stayed home so I wouldn't lose a night's sleep when he didn't have time to buy wrapping paper for birthday gifts I had them ready with ribbons by morning I always made sure to wake up before he got home from work so we could cook and eat together his dinner my breakfast then he'd go to bed and and I'd write for hours beneath the moon eventually I would crawl quietly into his arms and we' dream happily alongside each other for a few minutes anyway before he had to get up on weekends he played guitar saw friends soaked in the sunshine all while I was still Draming by the time I dragged myself to the coffee maker he' cycled 35 miles and eaten two meals with the sun setting he greeted me with a happy good morning he told me about his day I told him about my yesterday and so it went the Earth spinning for each of us in turn we made the most of the hours when our lives overlapped then let each other thrive in our own times like animals in our Wilds in August the earth made its annual path pass through the dust and debris of that ancient Comet late that night Justin drove me to a secluded beach on the NorthShore of Massachusetts where a handful of stargazers stared Skyward he put down a blanket as frogs croaked in the distance then he fumbled in his camera bag pulling out a small black box I couldn't see what was inside just a glint like the flicker of a star then he asked asked will you marry me we lay back on the blanket grinning as meteors Streed the Sky by then it was nearly 2: a.
m. too late to call anyone to squeal our news to family and friends instead we just lay there in our shared place and time surrounded by sand and ocean and a few hundred billion stars that's Logan Browning reading Amanda gf's essay the night girl finds a day boy more from Amanda after the break Amanda gter and Justin are married now and recently celebrated their 2-year anniversary Amanda says that they tried to have their wedding at a time that would work for everyone I was like how late can we push this ceremony because I need to be awake for this um it was at 7:00 and it was in a planetarium in Philadelphia so it was under this giant Moon and all these stars and it was really beautiful and perfect and dark and lovely Amanda wakes up in the late afternoon and goes to bed in the morning and she says that for her whole life she felt that she was meant to live on that schedule there was a piece of me that did sort of know down that I was just living on the wrong hours and I was at my parents house not long ago and I was going back through old Diaries and saw that I when I was like 9 years old I had written these diary entries where I said I can't wait till I'm older and I can live on altar hours which was apparently this like phrase that I had come up with to describe what I thought should be my my normal day where where day and night are inverted so I think I just always knew that and I knew like someday I'll be able to to do that and not be so tired anymore the way that people who have this describe it it's like if you travel to another country and you're jet legged for a few days that's what it feels like all the time when you have this disorder and you like for a normal person you eventually adjust and the kind of definition of this disorder is that you're unable to do that you can't shift so just being on my own schedule was like oh my God like the brain fog lifts and you're like I can think straight and I feel more normal and like it would be really hard for me to now go back Amanda says that before Justin she mostly dated people whose schedules worked more easily with hers but she knew that she and Justin were a great fit and these days they're still making things work on opposite schedules the hardest thing about it is not even so much the logistics and it's not even so much not having time together because in the evenings we have a fair amount of time where we're both up it's the fact that we're never at the same point in our day and we're never in the same kind of mental space so you know he gets home from work and he's been up all day and doing things and he gets home and he immediately like wants to talk and tell me everything that happened that day and I'm like please just let me have my coffee you know like I just have to like have quiet for a minute and wake W up and and then around midnight my brain just turns on and all of a sudden I'm like a chatter box and I just want to tell him like every idea I have for every writing piece that I'm working on and and he's just like trying so hard not to yawn you know all he wants to do is go to bed so like we can be sitting right next to each other but we're in different time zones and she says that she's learned to see her differences with Justin in a positive light like Justin always refers to me as his night elf because the apartment of be a mess and he'll go to bed and then he wakes up and it's just sort of like magically clean and um and then you know he can do so much for me during the day that I'm completely incapable of doing I mean it's really like writing a book to me seems feasible picking up my dry cleaning seems utterly impossible it forces you to be creative about how you relate to each other and what you can do for each other and um I think that's a good thing Amanda doesn't want to romanti excise living at night too much she knows that many people facing similar challenges aren't able to have a flexible schedule and life can be very difficult but she says she has truly come to love the nighttime hours with this disorder you know people ask like would you change it if you could and I honestly don't know the answer like I mean Justin would kill me for saying that because he'd be like of course you should change it but I mean it would make our lives easier and it would make my life easier like I'd be to you know go to the post office if I had to but at the same time like I really love the night and I love having all that time and quiet to write and to think and to read and just to kind of have my own little world and we get to have these different lives and then come together and share them and and I think that's special Amanda gter she's a science journalist who writes about physics philosophy and cognitive science and she's the author of The Memoir trespassing on Einstein's lawn more right after [Music] this Daniel Jones editor of the Modern Love column for the New York Times says that Amanda's story deals with one of the most unusual issues he's ever encountered in a modern love essay after reading thousands and thousands of sub missions over the years and then coming across a problem where a woman is having dating issues because she's awake at night and asleep during the day and you know any anyone 99.
