My Spouse and I Fought Over the Thermostat for Years. Here’s How We Finally Figured It Out.

I heard some shuffling, then felt the mattress tilt slightly to its side.

“Laura?” I said, while half asleep. She’d just crawled into bed next to me.

A moment later, she turned towards me and said, “I hate to admit to this—but last night, I got hot.”

I smiled and said, “Well how about that?”

This was a big confession. We’ve lived together in relative harmony for years now. The only thing we routinely bicker over is the thermostat, which is a painfully common domestic squabble. Every night, I walk into the bedroom, only to see her under a blanket, with her hands over the top of it, head poking out, and giving me her sad puppy face, “Can we pretty please make it warmer?”

I typically sigh, roll my eyes, then shuffle over to the thermostat like a defeated man being led to the gallows. I’ll bump it up two degrees, knowing full well that within five minutes I’ll be lying in a puddle of my own sweat, staring at the ceiling, questioning my life choices.

We’ve realized I’m good at 74 degrees and below. But I wake up in sweats at 75 and above (we are American, so please assume henceforth my numbers are in Fahrenheit). Conversely, she always claims to be, “Freezing to death” at 74 and below, but she is a bit dramatic. You’d think that someone born and raised in Albany would have more tolerance for cold.

In my attempts to alleviate our problem, I made a well-intended mistake: I bought an expensive mattress with gel cooling technology to help me stay cooler in this Floridian heat. What I hadn’t anticipated, was that the mattress would absorb the house’s cold and morph into a 200 block of ice.

Part of the challenge is with our baseline body temperatures. I’m 6’4 210 lbs. Larger body mass tends to result in a higher body temperatures and more conservation of heat. As an aside, this is also why many northern species of animals are enormous—like elk, Siberian tigers, and large bears (this phenomenon is described by Bergmann’s rule).

Laura is smaller, and has an inborn intolerance for cold — which is why she fled New York to Tampa, Florida.

We eventually found a way out of this mess and it was simpler than I expected.

I saw this fight everywhere