Our bickering just isn’t the same anymore
(Originally published June 2024)
Halfway through last week’s heat wave, and after 32 years of procrastination, Mark and I finally did it: we put in an air conditioner. For a moment, we felt like a young couple again.
Let me explain.
There was nothing inherently romantic about the act of installing the air conditioner, a smallish window unit. However, it recalled the endless inconsequential but infuriating things we used to fight about in our early days together. We don’t tend to have those sorts of conflicts anymore, which is a testament to our personal growth as a couple.
Just kidding.
It’s more because we’ve long since worked out the standard new-couple issues. It took a few years for us to agree on all kinds of things: how to load the dishwasher, whether to run a fan at night for white noise, who got control of the alarm clock (and whether “snoozing” was an acceptable practice), whether to keep butter in the fridge or on the counter. Those disputes seem minor in retrospect, but at the time they were constant sources of friction.
In addition, now that we’re older, we don’t hold onto a lot of resentment. That’s partly because we tend to forget what we were mad about and partly because we’re tired; we just don’t have the energy to bicker the way we used to.
The air conditioner, however, had the potential to cause a good spat, and we were up for it.
We obviously weren’t too pressed about air conditioning in general, given that it took us decades to get any. And we agreed that the air conditioner was meant to bring the living room down to a comfortable level, not turn it into a cryogenic chamber. Still, we saw several openings for petty disagreements, and we had high hopes of at least a minor blowup.
“We had high hopes of at least a minor blowup.”
The installation itself was simple, so we only managed to get a little snippy over how to attach the accordion sides to the unit. Like a responsible consumer, I was reading the instructions, something Mark thinks shows weakness. In his defense, I was reading them wrong. For a second, we were reminded of that memorable five-hour rage fest in 1998 when we assembled our first gas grill, the Divorce Maker 2000. What a night.
This dust-up, in contrast, was short-lived and didn’t include any obscene gestures. But once the unit was mounted, we found opportunities to quarrel about everything from what outdoor temperature and dewpoint warranted running it to how low to set the thermostat.
I wanted to cover the living room doorway with a blanket to avoid overtaxing the unit; Mark refused. And he wanted to turn the unit on before we left that evening so we could return to a cool house. I rejected that as a waste of energy.
Before we knew it, we were back in time: I began lecturing him on the concept of BTUs vs. room size, using a confident tone that suggested I knew what a BTU was. Yelling over me, he offered to yank the A/C unit out right then, since I was clearly too cheap to ever be willing to turn it on.
It was a fraught but exhilarating minute or two, but we were out of practice and tiring fast. Plus, we were late for dinner with friends and needed to get ready.
Thirty years ago, we would have kept up the sniping as we showered and dressed. On a good night, we would have barely spoken to each other during dinner.
Ugh. That seemed like a lot of work, especially in such hot weather.
Instead, when I came downstairs, I found Mark in the living room, quietly tacking up a blanket over the doorway to the kitchen. In response, I brushed silently past him and switched the A/C on so the living room would be pleasant when we got home. We had a fun night with our friends and did not speak of the air conditioning again.
This is how we are now.
Don’t think our marriage has devolved into a static tableau of easy compromise and mutual respect, though. We haven’t given up on annoying each other.
After all these years, for instance, Mark still tosses Band-Aid and cough drop wrappers on the counter near, but not in, the trash can. And I leave my shoes in front of the door where he will trip over them when he gets home. But that’s about as much strife as we can muster these days.
I hate to say it, but we’re getting soft in our old age.
