Resolving a marital conflict: thermostat wars
By Jay MacDonald • Bankrate.com

You might love the same movies, crave the same foods and share the same doctor, dentist and dry cleaner. But even the best-matched couple can come to blows over the temperature setting of their love nest.

Thermostat wars result when the metabolism of one spouse or partner runs hotter or cooler than the other's. As a result, one either swelters or freezes indoors while the other is perfectly content -- except for that nagging feeling that their partner is uncomfortable.

Before moving in together, we typically learn many of our partner's preferences: what foods he or she enjoys, whether he or she likes pets, whether he or she wants children, general household behavior and so forth. But a difference in ambient-temperature preference often comes as an unpleasant, and seemingly unsolvable, conundrum for many otherwise compatible couples.

"The difficulty is, on the surface it looks like it's either going to be hot or it's going to be cold in the room, so there's going to be a winner and a loser," says Susan Heitler, a Denver clinical psychologist and author of "The Power of Two," a book and workshop for couples.

After all, what's more basic than body heat?

Not surprisingly, thermostat wars tend to erupt in summer and winter and abate in spring and fall, leading to a seasonal cycle of control nudging, blanket stealing and endearing-nickname calling ("Popsicle Toes," "Nanook of the North") that only serves to mask an ongoing predicament.

Nor does initial temperature compatibility preclude the possibility of a perplexing divergence later in life, when the hot flashes of menopause, weight gain or loss, or medical conditions prompt one or both of you to start spinning the thermostat like a safecracker.

And the more coldblooded among us like to wrap ourselves in righteousness by pointing out all the money our metabolism will save the household in heating and cooling bills.

Can you and your temperature-challenged mate ever co-luxuriate in the same space? Are you fated to love one another from different lines of latitude?

Nah -- fortunately, there are creative solutions that can at least win a truce, if not end your thermostat wars for good.

Goldilocks and wool socks
Diane Sollee, founder and director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education in Washington, D.C., reassures us that discord is perfectly natural in loving relationships.

"It's normal to disagree about just about everything, because you're two different people," she says. "The myth is that you become one at the altar, but you don't. That's something to celebrate and be glad about. If you want to have 'one,' you can remain single and then you can leave the temperature wherever you want it."

Sollee led other marriage psychologists and therapists away from old-school marriage counseling, in large part because of its dismal success rate. "Eighty percent of the people who went to marriage therapists got divorced," she says.

The so-called marriage movement now focuses on teaching couples the skills to work together toward resolving issues. "We don't call this therapy or counseling, because we don't need to diagnose them in any way or probe back into their deep childhood wounds," she says. "We just show them which behaviors work and which ones don't work."