My dad had one weird pocket of chauvinism in an otherwise solid worldview, which was that men and women did not, and could not, like the same films. My sister once told him that she couldn’t imagine going out with someone with a completely different taste in cinema, and he said: “In that case, you are destined to marry someone who lies to keep you happy, and there are worse people you could end up married to.”
Take out the nonsense gender essentialism – indeed, gender altogether – and films, substitute “any couple” and “central heating”, and I’m pretty much with him. There is no such thing as a couple who wants their house the same temperature, and there are definitely couples who lie to keep each other happy.
I know a guy who pretends not to know how to use the thermostat, which strategic incompetence relieves him of the burden of those wars, stealth-adjusting the temperature until it gets stealth-adjusted back. Then his missus sets the heating to his preference, because his cluelessness is just too cute. There are couples who interact maturely on the subject, with a lot of supplementary chat around thrift, vests and windows. There are households whose debate is very immature and ends with: “Who could ever live in this heat, apart from your mum?” “Your mum.” “Your mum.”
The beauty of it all is how many other conversations about compromise, lifestyle, mortality, domestic load and everything else get mediated through this very slow-burn conversation, which starts between late September, when the person who wants to be warm enough notices the first cold day, and runs until mid-November, when the person who is too warm thinks central heating season should begin. I think it is roughly what harvest time would have been to a pre-industrialised marital unit – the release valve, via a set of practical, crop-and-pig-based conflicts, for all the other tensions of the year.
Then the year arrives when it goes from summer to winter in a single night, and a calming six-week ritual has to happen in six minutes. I’m not saying it’s an open battle in every house, but good luck with Christmas, everyone.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
