To state the obvious, no relationship or marriage is all joy, all the time. My husband, Rob Cottingham, and I have been married for 22 years, and even though we still love each other (and even more amazingly, still like each other!), living with another human means dealing with all kinds of little irritations.
To state the not-so-obvious, technology gets at least some of the credit for our lasting relationship. Rather than letting the little irritations build up to the point where they affect our relationship, we try to knock them out of the picture—not by trying to change each other, but by embracing simple tech solutions that make a lot of those friction points vanish without debate or discussion. Some of our tech fixes involve substantial effort or investment, but a lot of them are small, easy changes involving tech tools that a lot of people use already.
In the interest of fair play, I’ve asked Rob to join me in discussing how we use technology to address some of the annoyances that can come up in a relationship.
ALEX: Someone left the lights on all night. I’m now the early bird in our relationship, and as my sleep schedule shifted earlier and earlier, I found myself getting irritated if I woke up in the middle of the night to find that Rob left all the lights on—partly because it’s a waste of electricity, but even more because I found it harder to fall back asleep if the hallway light was shining into my eyes. So, I replaced all the light switches in our house with smart switches that connect to our network, and set up a simple home automation system that turns off every light in the house at midnight.
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ROB: Don’t forget our kid’s bedtime routine. I handle bedtime with our youngest, and when I’m on the road for work, Alex sometimes needs help remembering how it unfolds. (In fairness, a NASA flight director would probably need a reminder or two: This kid’s routine is involved.) To keep things on track, we’ve added his bedtime routine to our household manual—stored as an online document, so we can both update and access it instantly, along with all the other essential child info (from healthcare ID numbers to how much protein powder goes into his morning waffles).
ALEX: Where did you put the car keys? Sometimes it feels like marriage is just a very long process of looking for where your spouse put your glasses, your phone or your keys. We have eliminated a whole bunch of those “where did you put my…” conversations by putting Bluetooth trackers on everything we both use regularly, like our shared car keys or the treat bag we use when we’re walking the dog.
ROB: Your alarm clock wakes me up too early. When you marry someone, you know they’ll evolve and grow. And you welcome it…even when what they evolve into is an early bird. What’s a little less welcome for this night owl is being awakened by Alex’s earliest meetings of the day. Apple Watch to the rescue: Its silent alarms make sure Alex has plenty of time to meet with her East Coast clients while her West Coast husband keeps dozing.
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ALEX: You did the grocery shopping, but you forgot the yogurt. In the olden days, I used to blow my stack whenever Rob returned from the grocery store short an item or two, because he had left the grocery list behind, on the fridge. Then we switched to using our Amazon Echo for our shopping list: Anyone can add to the list by saying, “Echo, add yogurt to the shopping list,” and when either of us goes to the grocery store, the up-to-date list is available on our phones. The only risk? Buying a package of Oreos because one of the kids added it to the list.
ROB: You loaded the dishwasher wrong. It’s a heavy burden, being the only one in the household who can properly load a dishwasher. So instead of sharing this responsibility with Alex and gnashing my teeth at her dish-loading technique, I’ve taken the job over altogether, something made possible by mounting a home assistant underneath our kitchen cabinets. The device makes it easy—and resentment-free—to catch up on my news briefing while I unload the dishwasher in the morning, and distract myself with TV episodes in the evening while I load.
ALEX: We keep buying food we already have in the house. I’m pretty serious about keeping our pantry well stocked and well organized. But because Rob does most of the grocery shopping, our pantry sometimes overflowed with extra jars of peanut butter (or bags of flour, or cans of tomatoes) that he purchased without realizing we already had a stockpile. Now I maintain an online spreadsheet with an inventory of our pantry and freezer, so it’s easy to see what we have in stock—and when we’re genuinely running low.
ROB: I’m tired of listening to your TV all the time. I am in genuine awe at Alex’s multitasking skills: She watches TV while she does almost everything—from writing proposals, to crunching data, to winding down for bed. At times, though, it’s just a little much to have to listen to. But now those period prestige dramas and gritty British detective shows play silently on our household screens. That’s thanks to the Roku streaming sticks we’ve added to both our living-room and bedroom TVs, allowing Alex to hear her shows on headphones via her phone’s Roku app.
ALEX: You dropped the ball on my birthday plans. Intellectually, I know that a big birthday celebration isn’t a measure of whether I’m loved or how well my life is going. But emotionally, I can’t help feeling disappointed if the week of my birthday rolls around without a special plan in place. Since event planning isn’t Rob’s forte, I’ve learned to forestall disappointment by setting up an annual calendar reminder for a month before my birthday, so I can remind myself to organize a trip or gathering for the big day.
ROB: Our bed is way too hot. For the longest time, most bedtimes would see me comfortably cool and just slipping over the hump into blissful unconsciousness…when half-asleep Alex, who often finds it hard to get warm enough at night, would snap me awake by muttering a plaintive, drowsy “cold.” That would trigger a less-than-restful round of adjusting the thermostat and rebalancing the duvet. Rescue (and sleep) finally came in the form of a dual-zone heated mattress pad. Now Alex can toast her side of the bed to Tahiti-level temperatures while mine stays subtropical.
ALEX: Our bedroom is way too cold. Rob’s habit of turning the temperature down at night used to mean I woke up to a freezing cold house that made it hard to get out of bed. Now we have a programmable thermostat that turns the heat on an hour before I wake up, plus a living-room heating pad I can cozy up with in the mornings.
ROB: I need some cheerleading help. Whenever Alex claims victory over some especially thorny tech problem, she likes to exclaim a rhetorical, partly self-mocking “Who is all powerful?!” The kids and I then answer, “You are!” This never stopped being amusing to me, but our kids have much more sensitive built-in cringe-o-meters. So I turned to automation, writing an Alexa skill that answers anyone who asks “Who is all-powerful?” with “That would be Alexandra Samuel. Jeff Bezos is a distant second.”
Dr. Samuel is a technology researcher and co-author of “Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work…Wherever You Are.” Email her at reports@wsj.com.