When one partner wakes early and the other stays up late, the fix isn't forcing anyone to change. Instead, each person takes steps to protect the other's sleep: quiet exits, adjusted routines, and conversations about what you can do rather than what they should.
Here's a situation I think many of us can relate to. You live in a household where somebody is an early morning person and the other person likes to get their quiet time late at night. How do you align those 2 schedules? Well, the answer is you don't. You try to accommodate that one of you wants to get up early while the other one wants to sleep in a little bit, and the other person needs to go to bed early where the other one wants to stay up a bit. And I think it starts with understanding, right? It starts with making preparations so that you can sneak out of the bedroom without waking them up, or that you can go to bed without waking your partner up. But if you have those kinds of conversations at home, think about what you can do, not what the other person should do, but what can you do to accommodate them, and then try and do that and see how things go.
