Your preferences are like mine (see the sky/water, maintain contact with diurnal clues). But if you're sucking it up to try to give the wussy first-timer a comfortable introduction, maybe a compromise could help:

I have a little LED flashlight that clips to the sheets or pillow in case the route to the bathroom has uneven steps or other hazards. Since here will be two of you, a low-level nightlight might be an even better improvement over total darkness.

If the cruise is this year it's too late to worry about it, but the QE2 bridge staff used to use the bowcam to play an April Fool's joke on the pax. By April 1 QE2's route was usually in sunny flat-calm Mediterranean waters, so instead of the real-time feed, they'd substitute a tape of a rough transatlantic winter crossing with heaving 20m waves, pounding squalls, etc. They'd get calls from pax saying it was smooth in their cabins, why did the weather look so horrible way up front?