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GREENSBORO — The minute Neil Thompson leaves the house for work, his wife heads for the thermostat.

“She’ll turn it way up. I mean, 70, 71 degrees,” he says. “And she’s got this little radiator that she drags around the house everywhere she goes.”

Across town, Amy Buchanan has to implore her husband just to turn on the heat in the car and roll up his window on weekend drives.

“I’ll be freezing,” she says. “I just don’t understand.”

What is there to understand? Men are from Mars. Or some other frozen, tundralike planet where the inhabitants wear Crocs without socks (“I’m just putting out the trash”), drive the kids to school with no coats (“It’s supposed to warm up later”), and sleep with the windows open on 20-degree nights (“We need the oxygen”).

Hear, hear, says Thompson.

“I can’t stand to be cooped up. The oxygen makes me feel so ALIVE,” Thompson explains of the open-window effect.

But honestly. Crocs without socks? In winter?

“I LOVE Crocs. They just feel so good. Have you ever worn them?”

Women, on the other hand, are from Earth, where room temperature is 75 degrees, heated seats were invented for a reason, and windows, like shoeboxes containing white sandals, are never opened past Labor Day.

This is how humans have thrived through the ages. By taking shelter, creating warmth, protecting their young. Could it be argued that women are simply following their survival instinct?

James Piedad, who has a running battle with his wife over the thermostat, thinks not.

“I think we just have a different internal body temperature,” says Piedad, who keeps the thermostat set at 69 degrees, two degrees lower than where his wife likes it.

He finds neither rhyme nor reason in her thermal dynamics. She turns the heat up, but cracks the windows, which sucks the heat out.

“It’s so you don’t suffocate, I guess. Her mom did it,” he says. “But my favorite is in the summertime. She likes to turn the air conditioning way down so that we need a blanket on the bed.”

Part of Thompson’s insistence on turning the heat down is frugality: He estimates he shaves $50 off the family’s monthly heating bill by turning the furnace down to 66 degrees.

But he admits that this might not be the smartest place to conserve.

“Women tend to be smarter than men. They also have better pain tolerance. Except in this one instance, when it comes to cold,” he says. “Men would just freeze to death, and by the time they’re frozen, it’s too late.”

Linda Bennett, who was having lunch with her grandchild Friday at McDonald’s near Green Valley Road, said that in her marriage, there came one great equalizer for the thermostat: That was the hot flashes that hit her and her husband at about the same time.

These days, they keep the thermostat in the low 60s, while her elderly mother keeps it warmer downstairs.

As Bennett finished her lunch, her preschool grandson toddled off without a coat, or shoes, into the PlayPlace , which was as frigid as it was outside.

But why would he mind? Children are from Pluto.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com