Like me, Mike doesn't sleep well. When he's in town, he tends to wake up around four. He works for a while, then comes back to bed just before my alarm goes off.

We were parking the car when he said, "How much does it bother you that I get up in the middle of the night?" My loft doesn't have any walls, but putting a pillow over my head takes care of any noise. "No," he said, "not just the noise. I can tell you don't like it."

And it's true, I don't, although I hadn't really thought about it. Jake used to work all night, and he rarely went to bed or woke up with me. The fact that Mike almost always comes back up makes all the difference, though.

"Well," he said, "I want you to tell me the stuff that you don't like, even if you don't think it's big. Like this, if it turns out to matter, I can, I don't know, try to work on changing my sleep patterns."

This is where I, always impressive and graceful, bolted from the car and took off down the street, saying I was running to the corner store. Instead, I crossed the street to the park, sat on a bench, lit a cigarette, and tried not to cry, completely overwhelmed by this person.

I had always assumed that you learned about a partner's habits as you went, found out about the stuff that bothered you, and decided if you could live with it or not. It never once occurred to me that there were people out there willing to adjust.

In my marriage, those little things that bothered me were scoffed at and called petty often enough to make me shut up about them. I thought that was just how it was. You got over it. You lived with it.

I didn't know that you could be with someone who wanted to know. I didn't know that a relationship could be like this.

Maybe it's all going to turn out okay.