When my girlfriend and I first started living together, everything was perfect.
All of my friends who had either been dating for a long period of time or were married were warning me that we were in the honeymoon phase of living together and to watch out for when the real problems would surface. I listened but I didn’t really believe them. After all, while we may have a few disagreements every now and then we never once had a big fight. All my more experienced friends tried to warn me because they explained that when you live with somebody you begin to learn all of their annoying habits and we all have some. We had been dating for a year now and so I was pretty confident that we would be fine. But sure enough, they were right. After only a month of living together we got into a big argument. It was over the thermostat of all things, however it wasn’t about the temperatures like one might expect. It was about the kind of thermostat we had. We had a traditional thermostat, not as old as say a dial thermostat but nothing fancy like a smart thermostat either. This was the problem, I preferred the thermostat that we had but my girlfriend had wanted to upgrade to a smart thermostat. A smart thermostat was too much for me, both expense wise and I didn’t generally see the purpose of it. I liked the simple and convenient and she wanted a modern home. We ended up deciding to just leave it as it was after looking at different heating and cooling suppliers and finding that a programmable thermostat can be quite expensive.