On the weekends, I sort of act like a teenager. The self-imposed curfew that presides over my week nights is cast aside. I stay up until the wee hours, watching TV, surfing the Internet and flipping through magazines. If I happen upon a movie that grabs my attention, it could be 2 a.m. or beyond before my head actually hits the pillow.

What’s the big deal you ask? Well, the big deal is, I’m not a teenager. I can’t stay up all night and then actually function the next day. I used to be able to pull an all nighter. But that was like 30 years ago.

Spoiler alert: when you get to be a certain age you need your sleep. Take my word for it. Otherwise, you start to look and feel like part of the zombie apocalypse. You call your husband the wrong name. You don’t remember why you walked into a certain room. You go to the grocery store without your wallet. You doze off before 8:30 p.m.

Despite all of this self-knowledge, I can’t seem to help myself. Every weekend it’s the same thing. Stay up late. Get up early. I think I am just so focused on maximizing every second of my free time, that I ignore the rational voice inside my head that’s telling me to go to bed. I ignore the rational voice that is outside of my head, too. My husband, Jeff, will frequently see me doing the head bob, my final prelude to sleep, and he’ll try to coax me to go to bed. “I’m not tired,” I’ll say with my eyes half-open. Or, I’ll promise, “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Two hours later, I’m still up with remote or Real Simple in hand.

This past weekend was no exception. On Friday night I stayed up until after 2 a.m. watching Bridget Jones’s Diary. Full disclosure: Bridget Jones’s Diary was not my first movie choice. There were plenty of other good movies from which to choose. But when I landed on Bridget Jones’s Diary, it had just started. Add to that the fact that I really couldn’t remember having watched the entire movie previously and it was game on.

I don’t know if it was because I was already kind of tired or what, but at some point during the film, I felt like I was watching my life story. Well, not really. I mean I’ve never lived in England. I’ve never flirted with a boss. I’ve never worn a bunny costume. My mother didn’t run off with a guy who sold things on TV.

So I guess it wasn’t like watching my life story. It was just very familiar. There were certain parts of Bridget’s experience that were very familiar, very relatable. Here are three of the ties that bind dear Bridget and me.

1. I related to this 30-something’s desire to improve her life and find love.  I went through a similar period in my 30s. Single and very motivated to seek out and land a life partner, I started to do some work on myself to ready for that important relationship.

I will save the details around a lot of that work for a later blog post. (However, I will share that some of this work was shaped by learnings that came from a book written by Iyanla Vanzant called, In the Meantime. The crux of the book was that you need to do a lot of house cleaning with your personal life before you’re truly ready for love. You have to purge yourself of everything that is keeping you from an honest and true experience of love. You need to make time for yourself so you can uncover your own issues and work to correct them. You have to figure out what it is that you want and keep your eyes open for those things. And you don’t settle.)

2. I related to the scene when Bridget is singing, “All By Myself.” Haven’t we all had one of those moments when we get overly involved in the music? We’ve all been there, right? We’re either crying ourselves to sleep while listening to some weepy tune or getting pumped to face some scary feat while blasting a high energy piece.

My “All By Myself” moment came when an old flame was treating me poorly. Very poorly. After several beers and about 150 replays of “I Want it That Way” by the Backstreet Boys, I broke up with the guy. (Thank you Nick, A.J, Howie, Kevin and Brian.)

3. And finally, I related to Bridget’s happy ending. After all of the work, the angst, the emotion and the realizations, Bridget gets the guy. Not only that – she gets the right guy. She gets the guy who likes her “just the way she is.”

It took years of work, angst, emotion and realizations, but I finally got the guy, too. I got the guy who appreciates me for me. Jeff likes me just the way I am – the weekend night owl who doesn’t always listen to her inner voice, but who does occasionally listen to the Backstreet Boys.

With that, I think it’s time for bed.