There’s a lot of things that people don’t tell you when you’re getting into a long-term partnership.
Everyone paints this picture of marital bliss, where are you complete each other as whole individuals and can’t manage to live without one another. In my experience, this hasn’t been the case. In all of my long-term relationships, neither person has been completed by the other. Rather, living together is a slow and contentious battle to slowly change each person. This is most obvious when you inspect my current relationship and our ongoing wars over the thermostat. My husband and I have been together for over 10 years now. In that amount of time, we have never figured out how to compromise over the indoor air temperature control. Neither one of us has been able to budge a single degree in our personal air temperature preference. In fact, we have gotten into such massive fights over the energy bill and thermostat settings that I have spent weeks living with my mother before. Our inability to reach a compromise over the heating and cooling system eventually brought us to a breaking point. We could either find a new HVAC solution, or we needed to break up and find a more fulfilling relationship. Luckily, that’s when our HVAC technician steppedin with zone controlled heating and cooling. He told us that rather than abusing our central HVAC system or each other, we should install distinct zones which were independently controlled by separate thermostats. That way, no one has to compromise. We can have the most comfortable indoor air temperatures in every room, without seeking divorce counseling. This guy has improved our relationship more than our couples therapist.