Ships Passing in the Night

My boyfriend and I fight about two things: how messy I think he his and his work hours.

I work your typical 9am to 6pm schedule. He is a sports writer/editor for a newspaper and works from 2pm to 2am five days a week, days that change every week and include weekends. As someone with a conventional work schedule that doesn't change, his schedule frustrates me a great deal. He, however, accepts this as the nature of his industry.

I've mentioned his love for his job before and that he's wanted to be a sports journalist his whole life. He works, hard, long, odd-hours for unreasonable compensation and loves it.

He and I approach work in very different ways; I, while I love my job, work to live and he lives to work. Add that to his crazy, always changing schedule and you have one very frustrated girlfriend. I get annoyed when he isn't off on weekends and I want him to go to a party or I find myself alone with no one to hang out with. I get annoyed when he make plans with friends on a day he has off because that's time I'm losing with him (I know, I have to work on this one).

We also live in two different cities. He is only an hour and fifteen minutes outside of New York so it's not far enough to be considered long-distance but it's not close enough that I see him as often as I'd like. Again, frustrating. Eventually, likely later this year, we'll move in together. Here in the city (a huge give on his part). So we'll at least be sleeping in the same bed at night but could still go days without being awake together at the same time.

In my perfect world, we'd have similar work schedules. Schedules that didn't include nights or weekends. I could make plans with my friends without checking if it's his night off or we could take a weekend trip without using his vacation days. As much as I hope that will happen and happen soon, it doesn't look like it's in the cards.

My M.O. with this situation is to get upset, fight and then get over it only to get upset a few weeks or months later. A draining cycle for both him and I. So I'm wondering, how am I supposed to deal with this long-term? How do those of you who have significant others with opposing work schedules deal?