Always Late? Blame Your Time Personality.

New York Times

6 days ago

Early in their relationship, before they married, Anne Kelsh was working from home and enjoying making dinner for her partner — what she called 'the fun of the domestic role.'
He told her he'd like to eat when he got home at 6 p.m. That was a bit on the early side for Ms. Kelsh, but she was willing to accommodate — until she eventually realized that 'when he said 6 o'clock, he meant 6 on the dot.'
For her, the time was more like a suggestion. '8 o'clock is the time the curtain goes up at a show, and you must be there for 8 o'clock,' she said. 'But dinner — it's dinner. It's dinner in our own house. I could not understand that sense of rigidity.'
Punctuality became a constant source of friction. Ms. Kelsh, who had struggled all her life with getting things done on time, used to say, 'I married you, I didn't join the army.'
Meanwhile, her husband was frequently bothered by her inability to arrive promptly to appointments and gatherings, a habit he considered rude.
Arguments about punctuality are common, but experts say they are often really about something else entirely: the different ways we relate to time. Social scientists have worked for the better part of a century to understand our varying approaches to the clock. In the 1950s, the anthropologist Edward T. Hall coined the terms 'monochronic' and 'polychronic' to describe different cultural attitudes to time management.
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