Marriage Crisis 2020: the Water Temperature for the Hot Tub
Hot tub operation is not as trivial as it seems
Cold(er) air has finally arrived, kicking off the 2020–2021 hot tub season. So here we are again, discord in marriage: my wife prefers a “luke warm” tub of 99 degrees, while I prefer a “reasonably hot hot tub of 101”. If you think that 2 degrees isn’t that big of a deal, you are a dolt. You probably also think that the Earth is flat, NASA never landed on the moon, and Papa John’s pizza is better than a stale piece of bread with a lot of ketchup on it. All wrong.
You might also think: “just compromise!”. You’ve never been married. Contrary to what is usually written in marriage counseling books, compromise is the Devil’s Staircase to one-sided domination. Giving in on that one degree displays a spine that is so weak that this scenario becomes very likely:
Me: “I want to watch football this Sunday.”
Wife: “I want to throw rocks at old people.”
<long pause>
Wife: “How about we wear football helmets and pretend that the old people are tight ends?
Me: <to self> “Damnit, she got me again…sorry Mr. McFunklord.”
The house did not come with a hot tub, and they aren’t — unlike babies — magically delivered by storks. I always knew that I had wanted a hot tub, but I’m not exactly the king of following through on things. Or properly executing them. When we moved in, I wanted to build a bar for a man cave in the basement. Twelve years later, there is a structure in our basement that is nothing more than a skeleton of 2x4s — shoddily cut — with a layer of particle board on top. It holds surplus kid toys.
But back to the hot tub…
My wife was a stay-at-home mom at the time, and was becoming increasingly annoyed at seeing me open a local hot tub dealer’s homepage, clicking on the “BLOWOUT SUPER SALE!” link, and sighing heavily before moving on to www.whytheoriolessucksobad.com. She tooks the proverbial bull by the horns, and started to captain this voyage. Luckily, by this time in our marriage, she had learned that asking me for substantive input was really just a waste of everyone’s time. With this realization, we avoided project…
