We have negotiated the thermostat in this bedroom 4,127 times. I know because we have been married 19 years and we sleep next to each other every night and I am the one who logs everything. I am also the one who is hot.
Mike, my husband, sleeps in pajama pants and a long-sleeve shirt and socks and, for the last six months, a knit cap. He is cold. He has always been cold. He is the man for whom the office thermostat was originally calibrated, although that is not the version of cold the script writes about. He runs cold the way an old building runs cold. There is no fixing it.
I have, for the last fourteen months, run hot the way a small kitchen fire runs hot. Without warning. Often. With a recovery period afterward in which I am wrung out and need water. I am 52. My doctor confirmed last year, with eight months of bloodwork, that I am in active perimenopause. She said the average duration is four to eight years. I asked her if that was eight years of this. She said: "It is eight years of something. The specific thing will change. The thing about it being something will not."
The negotiation, distilled: he wants 71. I want 64. We have settled at 67, with a fan pointed at my side of the bed at the lowest setting and a second comforter for him. The fan is the concession. The second comforter is the concession. The 67 is the average of our needs, which is to say it does not work for either of us, which is to say it is a marriage.
What I did not anticipate, before all of this, was how much of marriage is the negotiation of bodies. I knew about sex. I did not know about sleep. Sleep is the negotiation that happens 365 nights a year for the rest of your life. The talk about the mental load we all read three years ago does not include thermoregulation, but it should. Every night, before I turn off the light, I am running a small calculation about whether to ask him to lower the AC to 65 because tonight I can already feel it. The calculation includes: the time, his work schedule the next day, the last time I asked, his face during the last conversation about it, what I have left in the bank account of being the one who needs things.
Last Tuesday I lowered the AC to 65 myself at 11:47 PM without waking him. He woke up at 4 AM with a hand under my back and turned it up. Then he went back to sleep. I did not say anything. He did not say anything. In the morning we both pretended it had not happened. It is the closest we have ever come to the thermostat being a divorce.
We will not divorce over the thermostat. We will divorce, if we divorce, over the same thing other couples divorce over, which is the cumulative grief of someone not believing what you say about your body. I have not had that experience with him yet. He has been good. He has been actually good. The fan was his idea. The second comforter was his idea. The hat was his idea. He has, in the last year, become the person I can tell at 3 AM that I am running hot and I cannot stop, and he will say "OK" and put his cold hand on my back. It does not solve anything. It is everything.
The thermostat in this bedroom is set at 67. Tomorrow night we will negotiate again. I will probably want it lower. He will probably want it higher. We will land somewhere we both can live in. That landing place is the marriage. The cold hand on the back when nothing works is also the marriage. I am running hot. He is running cold. We are running.