A home should have room for both people’s habits without making one person feel like a guest.

Two people rarely have the same domestic habits, and a shared home tends to settle around whoever cared more or arrived first. The other person then lives politely inside somebody else’s arrangement, asking permission for their own routine, which is a slow and quiet kind of exile. Neither of them has to be unkind for it to happen. Usually it is just accumulation that nobody stopped to review.

Find one room that runs entirely on your preferences and hand a piece of it over. Ask what the other person would change if they were setting the place up alone.