Is your other half LATE time after time?
Missing parties, planes and even cancer treatments ... the couples who prove why poor timekeeping is the flashpoint in so many modern marriages
OF ALL the everyday subjects that can cause a marriage to ignite into arguments and tension, you might imagine who does the housework or how much money you spend to be the most combustible.
Not so, says Dominic Pisani — his wife Louise’s persistent tardiness is a source of regular anxiety and exhausting quarrels.
Take the 60th birthday party he and Louise were invited to recently. After hours spent trying to get Louise to leave the house, the couple arrived 60 minutes late, and tried to slip into the room discreetly — only for the 150 other guests, champagne glasses in hand, waiting politely for the speeches to begin, to fall silent and scrutinise the late arrivals. Dominic was mortified — yet again. ‘We’d argued on the way about her taking so long to get ready and I spent the first part of the evening feeling unable to relax,’ says Dominic, 36, a TV producer who lives in Surrey with Louise, 34, a deputy director in the NHS.
‘As usual, Louise wasn’t fazed at all, calling our entrance fashionably late. But to me, it’s rude. We’ve been together for almost five years and her constant lateness annoys me.
‘That party was particularly embarrassing. everyone else was gathered for speeches so there was no escaping how late we were.
‘Before we met, my punctuality was my trademark. I’m certain Louise is often extra late on purpose now just to spite me.’
So can a committed clock-watcher ever really be happy with someone who’s constantly running behind time?
Though blissfully happy in every other respect, having recently had their first baby, Flynn (who was, ironically, two weeks overdue),
Dominic and Louise are often at loggerheads over her poor timekeeping.
Dominic first became aware of Louise’s habit in 2015 about three months after they began dating, when she kept him waiting in a restaurant for 30 minutes.
‘The waiter kept offering me a drink and I was beginning to think I’d been stood up,’ he recalls. ‘As our relationship became serious, I told Louise how irritating I found it, but she just didn’t see the problem.
‘When we moved in together in 2016, I had the added anxiety of us having to leave the house together, which meant suddenly I was also late for social events, something that made me very anxious.
‘It started slowly, with Louise always taking an extra five minutes to get ready, or leaving the house a few minutes later than planned.
‘Now it’s so bad I have to lie to her about the time we must set off. even then we’re still late for everything, usually caused by her taking 90 minutes to do her hair and make-up.’
There’s been just one instance where Dominic has been relaxed about Louise being late: their wedding day in Tuscany in 2017. After discussing it beforehand, Louise agreed anything more than ten minutes wouldn’t be acceptable.
Today, though, it has become a real flashpoint.
‘It’s become a competition where being late is a “win” for her. She gets cross at what she sees as me rushing her. But with no sign of this changing, I’m either going to have to put up or shut up, neither of which I’m good at. Her lateness is only going to get worse now we have a new baby son.’
Despite her husband’s irritation, Louise is unperturbed.
‘Socially I don’t like turning up on time, and I honestly don’t think organisers want people turning up early either. If I’m hosting, I certainly don’t,’ she reflects.
‘On my first date with Dominic, I did make sure I got there a few minutes early to make a good impression, but as our relationship developed, it became clear that punctuality is a big deal for him.
‘Now, it’s evolved into a parent and child situation. If we’re leaving for a party at 7pm he’ll tell me at 5pm to start getting ready. Instead, I’ll sit down with a cup of tea just to prove a point.
‘I think it’s far worse to be early, like the time he lied to me to get me out of the house and we were at a party at 7pm that didn’t start till 7.30pm.’
LOUISE says part of the joy of going out is doing her hair and make-up, and choosing what to wear — and while Dominic admits he appreciates the effort she makes, the time it takes drives him round the bend.
So why are some people always running late? It’s a question researchers have been trying to answer for decades.
Ron Bracey, a consultant clinical psychologist, says whether people are hardwired to be punctual or not is often down to personality type.
‘The moral explanation for lateness is that some people simply don’t rate punctuality as important, and nor do they have a social awareness of other people’s feelings or how their behaviour may affect them,’ he explains.
‘In my clinics, I have patients who arrive five minutes late and can’t apologise enough, and others who are half-an-hour late and have no sense of the knock-on effect on my day or that of other patients.
‘There’s a degree of narcissism and arrogance in these cases.
‘Some people who are always late simply have a very laidback attitude to life, while many tardy types are multitaskers who try to squeeze too many things into too short a time, underestimating how much time is required to travel to where they need to be.
‘Meanwhile, sticklers for punctuality are more likely to have obsessive traits in their personalities. So they’ll have a tidy desk, a tidy diary and they’ll operate by the clock. They know being on time can reduce and prevent lots of stress later on.’ Company director Donia Youssef, 41, is the punctual one in her marriage and admits her husband Thomas, also 41, drives her ‘up the wall’ with his perpetual lateness.
There’s seemingly no occasion for which he hasn’t been late, from parties to flights — even accompanying Donia to chemotherapy appointments after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017.
‘He was late for the consultation at the Royal Marsden and for all my treatments when I was diagnosed,’ she reveals.
‘It wound me up so much I started going with my mum instead and he’d turn up whenever.
‘When I had various surgeries, I’d tell him we needed to be there an hour earlier than we actually did, then he’d be cross when we had to wait ages at the hospital,’ says Donia, who lives in essex with Thomas, a safety manager, and their daughters Aaliyah, seven, and Tiana, four.
All the signs Thomas was a poor timekeeper were there on their first date nine years ago, when he was 30 minutes’ late to pick Donia up.
‘I shrugged it off but it quickly became clear he’s late for everything and has no qualms about it. He’d rather squeeze in an extra 15 minutes in bed or with his feet up watching TV,’ says Donia, who was introduced to Thomas by a mutual friend.
Their first real argument came not long after they met, when Thomas’s lateness was responsible for them missing a flight to Paris.
‘We weren’t living together then, so we arranged to meet at Stansted Airport.
‘Thomas didn’t arrive until our plane was taking off, for no other reason than he’d been faffing around and hadn’t left enough time,’ recalls Donia.
‘I was livid. But his reaction then, as now, was to go very quiet and say: “It’s fine, we’ll resolve it.” ’
‘I can’t decide if he’s laidback or
lazy. Either way, we’ve had loads of arguments about it.’
Donia reveals it takes him months to finish any tasks she gives him at home, such as moving their grand piano from her office to another room, and putting up a shoe rack. ‘Next week we’ve got parents’ evening at school and I’ve told Thomas it starts an hour earlier than it does, but there’s still a chance he’ll be late,’ she says.
Thomas, though, doesn’t understand why Donia gets so irate.
‘I’m mellow, she’s highly strung. I don’t see the point in rushing because it stresses me out and she already does enough of that for both of us,’ he explains. ‘Even when I set my alarm for 5am to get up for work, I keep hitting the snooze button and the irony is I end up rushing as I’m late all the time.
‘But my philosophy is that I’ll get there when I get there.
‘A couple of years ago, we took the children to Disneyland and Donia was on my case for 24 hours about being ready on time.
‘When we got to the airport she’d got the flight time wrong and we were four hours early. I thought that was hilarious and said: “You see, what’s the point in rushing?” ’
Thomas admits he’s never on time for his martial arts classes, despite them being only five minutes from home, and last Sunday he made the family more than an hour late for a child’s birthday party. ‘Donia minded but the hosts didn’t,’ he reflects.
‘They said they didn’t expect anything else.’
Trainee dental nurse Renee High, 36, is similarly laidback — but still manages to get to work and her six-year-old son to school on time.
Her social life is another matter, though — and her relaxed attitude here causes tensions with her husband Andy, 40, a charity worker, for whom being punctual has been ingrained since childhood.
‘I spend enough time watching the clock for work, and if I want to take my personal life at a slower pace, then that’s my prerogative,’ says Renee, from the Isle of Wight.
‘Being late doesn’t stress me out one bit, but it drives Andy crazy.
‘If we’re going to the zoo, for example, and it opens at 10am he wants to be there at 9.30, but as long as we get there before it closes, what’s the rush?
‘He always has a time in his head he wants us to leave the house and gets ratty with me when I’m not ready. Our son takes his daddy’s side and will urge me to hurry up.’
In the 12 years Renee and Andy have been together, they’ve argued about very little other than timekeeping.
SO WHAT does Renee put her lateness — which includes missing a flight while they were on holiday in the Caribbean a few years ago — down to?
‘I’m as casual as they come, from dressing in jeans and a T-shirt, to reading a book for five more minutes instead of getting ready when the taxi will arrive in ten minutes,’ she says. ‘I’m not late because I’m busy, I’m trying to relax.
‘It doesn’t bother me what other people might think if we’re late.’
Her husband, meanwhile, feels being on time is respectful.
‘My parents drilled it into me that you always showed up at least five minutes early,’ he says. ‘Now, even that’s not early enough and I go into panic mode if I drop my son off at school with five minutes to spare, for example.
‘It’s an anxiety that stems from my belief that punctuality is a matter of respecting the person or things that you’re doing.
‘On a couple of occasions, I’ve got so irate waiting for her that I’ve left the house on my own so she gets the hint I’m not messing around, and she’s got her act into gear and chased after me.
‘Being late makes me feel I’ve lost a bit of control and that she’s not respecting my feelings, although she says that’s not true.
‘Heaven help the marriages where both spouses are late all the time.’