Acute Angles: How Warm Is Your Relationship? |
Magazines keep printing articles with titles like "How Do You Rate Your Marriage?" The article usually consists of a series of questions: (1) Do you and your spouse see eye to eye on finances? (2) Are you sexually compatible? (3) Do you have similar tastes in entertainment? (4) Do you like your in-laws? And so on, ad nauseum. (Note that finances always come before sex.) You add up the number of Yes and No answers, and the score tells you whether you are happily married. Nowhere in any of these quizzes is there even a single reference to one of the most important of the factors that determine the success or failure of a marriage. It’s the marriage problem that nobody talks about, because it’s one that’s too hot to handle. A couple that has this problem is doomed to live together in years of married misery, because in our jurisprudence Thermal Incompatibility and Thermal Cruelty are not considered to be grounds for divorce. A typical situation can be like this: The husband’s internal thermostat is normal, and he can be comfortable at a temperature of about 70 Degrees. The wife is miserable at any temperature above 55 Degrees. (Or vice versa.) Nothing but trouble. One couple traded in a luxury car with 400 miles on the odometer because the air conditioner couldn’t bring the interior temperature below 60 Degrees in Arizona in the summer. They never knew whether any car they ever owned had a heater that worked. When one couple first discovered their problem, they thought it was due to the fact that the wife had more thermal insulating tissue than the husband. But that theory has long since gone down the drain. For years he has had much more thermal insulating tissue than she has, and still freezes in her comfortable temperature zone. Thermal Incompatibility is a relatively new sociological phenomenon that has not yet been adequately been studied by social scientists and psychologists. Some excellent work is now being done at the National Caloric Institute, and they have issued their latest findings in a report titled "The Thermodynamics of Marriage." One of the interesting findings is that there is no relationship between Temperature Compatibility and the "cold feet" syndrome. The problem seems to date from shortly after World War II, as a result of today’s higher population mobility and the widespread introduction of air conditioning and central heating. In earlier, less mobile times, cold people stayed in the cold, and warm people stayed in the heat. Cold people married one another and were happily cold together - warm people married one another, and were happily warm together. There was relatively little intermarriage. All that has changed now. If a couple is thermally incompatible, the thermostat in their home goes up and down like a yo-yo according to who happens to be walking past it, and is usually the first major appliance to wear out. And, considering the inevitability of Murphy’s Law, the room that the low-temperature spouse spends the most time in is always the warmest room in the house, while the high-temperature spouse’s room is always the coldest. The problem is year-round. There’s no relief in the summer, because with air-conditioning it’s possible to freeze in the summer almost as easily as in the winter, and in warm as well as cool climates. A cautionary note to low-temperature wives: One sign of a thermally unhappy marriage is a husband’s long absences from home. If her personal thermostat is the lower one, and she stays home or regularly gets home earlier than he does, she may find that he starts gettting home from work later and later. It’s not another woman - it’s just that is office (or the corner bar) is nice and warm, and he finds it preferable to freezing at home. The usual answer to complaints about the temperature is "Wear a sweater." The complainer ends up going around bundled up like a kid in a snowsuit, and sometimes on mild days in the winter goes outdoors to warm up. One couple recalls a winter when there was a severe snow and ice storm which caused an electric power outage that lasted for over a week Oil burners, of course, don’t work without electricity. The wife used to keep the house temperature so low that it was three days before they realized they had no heat. This particular couple now lives in a two bathroom house. His bathroom is the only room in the house where the husband can exist in some degree of comfort, if he goes into it and turns on the electric heater. He has it furnished it with the minimum necessities of civilization - a folding chair, a small black-and-white television set, and a telephone extension and spends a large part of his day there, coming out mostly for meals. Someday he intends to enlarge the bathroom so he can have room to put in a recliner and a 19-inch color television set. This husband is afraid he is doomed to a life of thermal discomfort because their temperature differences are so incompatible, and looks forward to spending eternity in a place where it’s nice and warm.