There is a war in our house that has been going on since the week we moved in together, and it has never once been resolved, only paused. It is fought entirely over a small plastic box on the hallway wall, and the two sides are as follows. Me, who believes a home should feel like a warm loaf of bread. And Sam, who believes a home should feel like the inside of a walk in refrigerator, ideally cold enough to keep produce fresh, just in case.
For the first year, I thought I would win through sheer persistence. Every time I passed the thermostat, I nudged it up a degree, the way you might slowly turn up a radio so nobody notices. Every time Sam passed it, he nudged it back down, muttering something about “efficiency” that I never fully believed, because a man who leaves the fridge door open while he reads the entire back of a cereal box is not a man who is truly worried about efficiency.
The real escalation happened the winter I found him wearing a coat indoors. Not a light jacket. A full winter coat, the kind with a hood, sitting on our sofa, watching television, as though this were a perfectly normal way to spend an evening. I asked him if he was cold. He said, without looking away from the screen, “No, I just enjoy the structure a coat provides.” I have been married to this man long enough to know when he is lying to win an argument, and that was one of the finest lies I have ever heard him tell.
I turned the heat up out of spite. He did not comment. He simply got up, ten minutes later, and opened a window.
We have tried, over the years, every reasonable compromise a married couple can try. A shared blanket, so that I could be warm and he could pretend the room was cold. Two different thermostats for two different zones, which our contractor said was possible and then quietly informed us, halfway through the estimate, was not actually possible in a house our size. A rule that whoever is home first gets to choose the temperature, which lasted exactly nine days before Sam began finding excuses to be home first, including one memorable Tuesday when he left work “early” and later admitted, under gentle interrogation, that nothing was actually wrong, he had simply wanted to win the thermostat.
What finally settled it, more or less, was not a system. It was our first winter with a baby in the house. Nothing sharpens a person’s opinions about temperature quite like a six month old who cannot tell you whether she’s cold, only that she is extremely unhappy about something. For about four months, I won every round, because nobody, not even a man who sleeps under a single sheet in January, is going to argue with a pediatrician’s recommended nursery temperature.
Sam never fully admitted defeat. But I noticed, that winter, that he stopped wearing the coat indoors. I noticed the window stayed closed. I noticed that some mornings, I would come downstairs and find the heat already up two degrees, quietly, before I had even touched it, like a peace offering nobody wanted to name out loud.
We are back to our regular disagreement now that our daughter is old enough to have her own extremely strong opinions about the thermostat, which, infuriatingly, seem to align with her father’s. It is now two against one in this house. I have started making my case directly to her, in the tone of someone building an alliance, which I recognize is a slightly unhinged way to parent, but I stand by it.
Sam still says he isn’t cold. I still don’t believe him. Some marriages are built on shared values and mutual respect. Ours, apparently, runs on a small plastic box in the hallway, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
