I’ve been talking a lot about “connection” lately.
To be fair, I work with a group of people who tend to be relationship idiots.
They don’t know how to be healthy around other humans, and I can’t really blame them. I try to help, but I’m a nightmare of a partner, myself. I make terrible choices with other humans and I’m only now realizing how little I’ve progressed in my romantic life. When I look back on my past relationships, usually it’s clear that things were never going to work out. We were different people with different opinions. We had completely different preferences in life. Generally, I couldn’t see that because we enjoyed doing some of the same unhealthy tasks together. Drink it up, smoke it up, and avoid your problems. That’s what we did for each other. As silly as it sounds, one of the major things that we probably couldn’t ever overcome were our personal preferences when it came to indoor air temperature control settings. The problem was, while he always felt hot, I always felt way too cold. This meant living together was extremely uncomfortable and expensive energetically. Everyday it felt like we got into a fight about the indoor air quality and our discomfort. He would wake up in the morning and start complaining that it was too hot. He would try to turn down the air-conditioning and I would start freezing. At the same time, I was always feeling like it was incredibly cold, no matter the thermostat settings. He wouldn’t complain that he couldn’t stop sweating, meanwhile I was shivering. If I tried to bump the thermostat up, we were bound to get into a nasty fight about energy usage and respecting each other’s comfort. These days, I’m thrilled to have the thermostat to myself.