I recently moved in with my boyfriend - I never expected us to be at 'war' over windows

Daily Mail​

03-05-2025

We moved into the flat in January of last year, my boyfriend and I. By then we had been going out for about two years. I assumed living together would be straightforward, and it has been. I look forward to seeing him every evening; he is a good cook; he is practical; he is tidy.
The trouble is that we have, it transpires, very different concepts of temperature, ventilation and smells. Those concepts being: he gets cold all the time, would live in a home that was hermetically sealed and does not mind the aroma of food. I, however, rarely get cold and could have had a good career as a sniffer dog. I smell everything – strongly and unpleasantly.
And so we entered into a window war. I would wake up early, get out of bed, go into the kitchen to make my tea and open the window. Half an hour later, he would wake up, get out of bed, go into the kitchen to make his coffee and push the window shut. The evenings were worse. My boyfriend would cook entire meals with the windows closed, the useless extractor fan fixed on a measly setting. I would walk through the front door, sniff twice and know we were having mushrooms for supper. Candles and diffusers were no help: next morning I got up and the food smells remained.
I confided in a friend at the pub. Living together was lovely, I said, but there was this weird and tricky thing about cooking and smells and windows. 'Oh,' she said, setting down her glass, her voice becoming suddenly serious. 'You have to have the windows open. Always.' Apparently her cousin – a boy who also didn't mind smells – never cooked with the windows open. He was a vegan so was always making stews. Eventually, she said, 'The smell of chickpeas baked in to the walls.' The thought of our otherwise happy flat becoming a giant legume scared me so much that I went home that evening, opened all the windows and sat in the living room for a while so it could air out. It was midnight – and late January.
I felt mad sitting in the cold, but I shouldn't have: in fact, I was pre-empting a trend.
Last month, the TV presenter and property expert Kirstie Allsopp advised people to practise lüften, a German ritual that involves opening windows wide every day, no matter how chilly it is, for at least ten minutes. As Allsopp explained, 'It is the way to deal with the majority of mould and damp problems.' She didn't mention that it is also the way to deal with pesky cooking smells but I'm sure she thinks that, too.
Consequently there were lots of articles with headlines like, 'I tried Kirstie Allsopp's easy (and free) trick for fixing black mould – the results were remarkable' and 'Struggling with mould? Kirstie Allsopp swears by this simple German trick'. Of course, what people on the internet are branding a new home hack I think a lot of others just call 'common sense'. Still, opening the windows has, sort of, gone viral.
When I proudly told my boyfriend about lüften, he said that having the windows open for ten minutes in the morning was quite different from having them open for hours in the evening while cooking as, in an ideal world, I would. I ignored this, obviously.
I am not alone in long-running window wars – wars that are, it transpires, fought over matters other than just cooking smells. My boss's partner likes their house to be heated to T-shirt weather all year but will also 'infuriatingly' open the bedroom window above the radiators that are on full blast. 'And he's not paying the bills!'
A cold-averse colleague also describes a 20-year-long (and ongoing) battle with her husband over a back door that leads from their kitchen to a draughty conservatory. She doesn't like the cold so keeps the door shut; he doesn't bother. 'I can be in the living room with the door shut and I still know he's got that bloody door open. And, obviously, I can't just ask him not to do this, I have to passive-aggressively, with a massive sigh, heave myself off the sofa, pointedly slam the door shut and go and put a jumper on until the downstairs has heated up again.'
These battles don't end when the weather warms. One member of YOU magazine staff reckons this time of year is, actually, the worst for the window wars. 'After a few days of sunshine, it's like a switch flips. My husband goes, 'Right!' and turns off all the radiators and opens all the windows – at all times. But it's still freezing in the evenings.'
Another says she specifically likes the windows to be closed in summer, rather than winter, because of her hayfever. Open windows let the pollen in. She is convinced her boyfriend buys her pollen-heavy flowers, like lilies, so that the flat itself becomes polleny and she's forced to crack open a window. (I admire his tactics.)
Also: noise. The same colleague whose husband now has the windows open constantly says that she's woken up by birdsong at 5am. 'The dawn chorus is at its peak in May!' I grew up under the flight path, so am immune to sounds. My dad, however – who sleeps with the windows open – was woken up, for 26 years, systematically, every day, at 4am by the clamour of the first plane. He has now moved house.
These conflicts aren't just at home, either. Safety measures mean you cannot open the windows yourself in either a simple room at a Premier Inn or a suite at The Ritz. Michelle Obama complained that the worst thing about living in the White House was not being allowed to open the windows on security grounds. There are many reasons why I will never become the first lady and/or the leader of the free world – not having been born in the United States, an (at best) flimsy understanding of geopolitics – but the idea of being unable to open windows in my own home is the primary obstacle.
After a year and a bit, my boyfriend and I still haven't worked out a window system that suits us. And there is, I admit, one actual snag, that comes with keeping the windows open all the time. Not that it's cold, or that it's noisy, but that stuff can get in: like mice or, worse, moths.
But that is another battle altogether.