As I write this sentence, I am in the midst of negotiations with my wife to solidify a new mutual morning routine. Sure, it's not the magnitude of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meeting at Yalta, but those of you who co-habitate with someone in a domestic situation (where there's only one bathroom) know that these are indeed delicate matters. Poorly engineered routines can only bring about worse outcomes.

For the entirety of the time that I have lived with my wife, including the period of our engagement, we've been fortunate that our morning timelines have never overlapped. She worked from home, I didn't. When she had to go back to an office situation, I was in one where my days started late; then it was my turn to work from home. But now we've got a major paradigm shift -- we're both working around office hours and our start times are separated by a mere half an hour. It's time to explore a brave new world.

It's not really the semantics of the issue that I'm worried about -- we're both flexible enough to have some give and take in what we do as we stumble around our domicile. The thing that must be worked out with a measure of delicacy is the need to stay out of situations where we have to interact. It had been easy for months now, as my usual alarm clock had been my spouse gently shaking me, giving me a kiss and announcing her departure. After a few minutes, I would roll out of bed, grind some coffee beans, and get on with my day, safe and comfortable in the fact that my wife still loved me because I hadn't talked to her before she was fully awake. We have discovered that this is for the best.

I should pause at this point to talk a little about the nature of my sleep cycle. It's neurotic. My brain has a standard operating procedure to shift into overdrive every night at about 11:00 p.m. and then run until it's out of fuel -- a period that lasts anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours. It's been like this for years now, and as frustrating as it is, I've basically come to terms with the fact that this is just something that I sort of do, like how my old Honda would always run its fan for several minutes after the car was tuned off. So the concept of going to bed in a timely manner is something of a fairy tale to me, unless I've been self-medicating with a little alcohol (but I don't like to drink a lot, thus negating the effectiveness) or with a natural supplement called melatonin (something that's supposed to stimulate faster sleep, but generally causes me to wake up periodically in the night instead). The end result of this is that I stay up later than I should. The initial stages of waking up are occasionally a challenge, but once I'm out of bed, have coffee and / or take a shower, it's a quick jog up to full speed. If I've slept well, if only for six hours, I can get punchy pretty quickly. This, ultimately, is the issue.

For all of the wonderful things I can say about my wife, it won't change the fact that she is not, and probably never will be, a morning person. Until she's been up for two to three hours, it's best to regard her as the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas -- something that you're compelled to keep watching for some sort of action, but the last thing you want to do is go near it because of all the landmines. I can accept this, there's nothing wrong with it in the least -- but for some reason, I can't help but poke at her during this tenuous morning time. Seeing as how I'm the antagonizer, I need to be the one to try and avoid putting us into this undesirable circumstance. She's doing her part already by wanting to be left the hell alone.

So here we are at a point where contact with each other during this daily period is all but assured. Hence the critical negotiations about who's going to do what and when. It's not so much about the problems of trying to share a bathroom as much as it is the need to have some personal space, and keep things as close to the established "I'm leaving now, I love you" as possible. A complex dance must be learned, allowing us to weave around our house with only flitting touches, our individual routines meeting in periods of brief harmony. It's got to be a ballet, other wise it's going to be tragedy.

Hence the need for a rock solid, mostly-foolproof plan to be up and about, doing parallel activities (I don't have to do my hair, for example) while not being in the same place at any one given time. So we've hammered out some basic itineraries to put into play, and we'll see how it goes. I've got a lot of faith that things will work out, and I certainly hope that they do -- otherwise one of us is going to have to go out and find a job that lets us have a workable routine in the mornings. As far as I'm concerned, that's going to be easier to do than trying to stop pestering my wife when she's not equipped to handle it.