I love my family, but I can only take them in small doses.
I believe this is normal for every family, so I don’t feel too horrible about my love of distance.
Unfortunately, my parents didn’t have any heat last week due to a massive furnace issue, so they needed a place to stay. If the temperatures weren’t supposed to drop so low and the weather channel wasn’t calling for snow, I wouldn’t have offered them a place to stay. This isn’t because I don’t love them, but because I know they’d be fine in their own home without heat if the weather wasn’t going to be so drastic. My parents gratefully took up my offer to stay at my house until their furnace was repaired. When they first arrived, they told me that it felt good to be in a home with working heat! This made me happy, but I knew they’d be dying to change the thermostat settings before dinner. They always change the thermostat settings in my house because they don’t like giving up control and since they’re in my house, changing the temperature is the only way they can feel in control. I was right, because I found my dad standing in front of my thermostat trying to change the settings. When I told him that only I could change the temperature because it was a smart thermostat he was shocked. Now, he’d have to ask me to change the temperature every time he wanted to change it. I knew he’d never amount to that, which is why I had the smart thermostat installed in the first place.