Rachelle Carson cries out in horror when she sees what her husband has done.
"Noooo!" she wails. "No, no, no, no! You can't! It's ugly!"
The target of her wrath: A bright red barrel her husband, actor and hard-core environmentalist Ed Begley Jr., has placed beneath the drain spout on their patio to catch rainwater for irrigation.
"I'm trying to balance things out," he pleads. "This is because of the long showers you take."
She is unmoved. "Either this goes," she growls, "or I go."
"I get a two-fer," Mr. Begley says brightly as she stalks away.
Ah, the course of green love never did run smooth.
Environmental enthusiasm has spawned a new relationship woe: the green gap.
It's an inconvenient truth, but love and friendship can go sour when one partner is eco-obsessed and the other thinks wind power means a hairdryer. The usual negotiations over whose turn it is to take out the garbage have a new twist.
Couples and roommates now bicker over whether it's acceptable to trash those grotty takeout containers instead of scrubbing them clean for recycling.
Mr. Begley and Ms. Carson illustrate the comic plight of a greener-than-thou relationship in Living with Ed, an HGTV reality series that premieres in Canada on Sunday, Oct. 7.
The show follows Mr. Begley as he cleans the solar panels on his roof, pedals an exercise bike to generate energy to run the toaster and hatches green schemes such as the rain barrels - to the alternating chagrin and amusement of his long-suffering wife, who seems to have envisioned a different sort of life when she married a Hollywood star.
"I'd really like to gut it, blow out some walls," Ms. Carson confides to the reality-TV cameras as her husband brags about the energy efficiency of their small (by Hollywood standards) bungalow. She later sneaks out in the middle of the night and hides the rain barrels in the garage.
While Living with Ed illustrates an extreme case of a green gap - no doubt exaggerated for the cameras - real-life couples can relate. Just ask Lindsay Coulter, who follows her husband around their Vancouver home switching off lights, or Lauren Gropper, who forbade her sister to bring regular laundry detergent into their Toronto apartment.
"We battle about having the laptop running," says Ms. Coulter, a conservation policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation in Vancouver. Her husband, an engineer, argues he doesn't want to restart every program each time he needs to use the computer.
"That gets my goat sometimes," Ms. Coulter says.
But she sees progress: He now buys biodegradable, non-toxic alternatives to common products, without prompting from her.
She says she's happy that he's adopted her values. "It's just a matter of getting into someone's brain."
On the other hand, Ms. Coulter has learned to relax on some things.
"I realized I had gone a little too extreme when I was buying the cat organic chicken," she says.
Her husband persuaded her they didn't need to buy carbon offsets for their wedding reception, because having all their guests in one place was more energy efficient than everyone eating dinner in their own homes.
"I said 'Okay, you're right,' " she recalls. "You don't have to say, 'It's my way or the highway.' "
Compromise is the key to any relationship, whether romantic or familial, and it's especially important when you're living with a greener keener or an enviro-sloth.
Advertising copywriter Alexis Gropper doesn't consider herself either; she's always recycled and thought she did a pretty good job. Then she moved into an apartment in Toronto with her sister, a green-building consultant.
"I bought a box of Cheer and she wouldn't let me bring it in the house," Alexis complains.
Her sister, Lauren, insisted on a green-branded detergent. She says she was aghast to learn Alexis wasn't using her composting bin. "I just went nuts," she says. "Her big beef was that it stinks, and I basically said, 'too bad.' "
Alexis nicknamed her big sister the green giant, and snuck the box of Cheer into the house when Lauren wasn't looking.
Teasing aside, Alexis has learned to use - if not love - the composting bin. And Lauren gives her a pass occasionally on rinsing out disgusting containers for recycling.
"You work as hard as you can to achieve those best practices, but nobody's perfect," Alexis says. Living with an environmentalist, she says, "you end up learning a lot."
Lauren says she tries to lead by example, and makes changes in small steps, such as replacing a few light bulbs or changing the hand soap in the bathroom. "It's not a huge lifestyle change."
Back in California, Mr. Begley has gone way beyond small steps. Best known for his role as Victor Ehrlich on St. Elsewhere in the 1980s, more recently Mr. Begley has appeared on Veronica Mars and Arrested Development. But perhaps his true claim to fame is as the greenest guy in Hollywood - Mr. Begley was composting and recycling way before it was cool, back in the 1970s.
In a phone interview, he excitedly describes his next project, excavating the backyard to build an underground cistern for water storage.
"If you're going to dig up the backyard, I say put a pool in," Ms. Carson interjects, prompting Mr. Begley to deliver an impassioned lecture on river systems and water shortages in the Los Angeles area.
She sighs deeply. "You see what I live with?"
Beneath their odd-couple bickering, Mr. Begley and Ms. Carson say their relationship should give hope to green-gap couples everywhere.
"There has to be a mutual respect," Ms. Carson says. "I'm not going to go as far as Ed is going to go, but I respect that."
"Honey," Mr. Begley says warmly, "I never knew that! It takes The Globe and Mail to let me know you respect me."
"And humour," Ms. Carson adds, sighing again. "If you can't laugh about things, you're doomed."
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