When I was dating, I always paid half because I wanted to be able to walk away at the end of the date without feeling like the guy was going to think I owed him something. I would leave in my nightstand drawer all the info I had on the guy I was out with, for my sisters to go and get in case something happened. I would call them post date to let them know I was home. We had a code phrase so that if I felt unsafe at home & they called, they knew to come over immediately (we lived in the same condo building on different floors). Sad that women have to take so many precautions and do so much preplanning to ensure some modicum of safety. When I started dating my now husband, there were many signs he was a “grown-up” and an equal: he had furnished his apartment with tasteful furniture and it was immaculate (he even owned a vacuum!!!); he did his own laundry, his finances were in order, he was employed, had a car & insurance & knew how to cook. The first meal he made for me was chicken breasts pounded flat, rolled up in a lasagna noodle with spinach, ricotta & mozzarella, covered in a white sauce with a green salad & garlic bread. WOW. I was blown away. When we started talking marriage, it was to plan together: the ring, the engagement, his wedding ring, the wedding, kids or no kids. It was all done together as partners. I appreciate and value him so much. We are truly a team. It’s not the poor girl waits for Prince Charming scenario or a “The Bachelor” scenario with the woman striving to prove herself worthy of the swain who struts around.
YES. "I wanted to be able to walk away at the end of the date without feeling like the guy was going to think I owed him something." This is why I always hated dating. Yet another feeling of obligation that I didn't need.
Sounds a lot like my husband except the furniture- we still live in the house he lived in with his brothers and I changed a lot of decor! He is a great cook, the first meal he ever made me was chicken pot pie, but I really liked when he made me the Iranian dish ghormeh sabzi and shared that part of his upbringing with me. He made it for me the night before my scheduled c section as my last meal before the fasting!
I was a very old first time bride. Like 45 when we got engaged. And my husband is a little younger, but also a fully functioning grown up. My husband is an active member of the most liberal Catholic parish in DC. So even though we were getting married in my very liberal Protestant church with my female pastor, we end up at pre Cana at his church. And while I was probably the oldest woman there, not by that much. We had to tell our engagement stories. We didn’t have one. We just mutually decided we were doing it. Also buying a house together. The two other couples I liked the most had similar stories. The more elaborate the engagement story, the less a marriage of equals it seemed.
'I joked that there was no equivalent for men. No, “End Male Loneliness Eggplant Parmesan.” No “Get the Girlfriend Gnocchi.”'
TOO RIGHT, and there damn well should be. There can be such satisfaction and joy in wooing someone through food; I would imagine this effect is exaggerated for men because we aren't socialized to feel the grim pressure of it. It seems to me that making food preparation a part of the courtship - and I mean the whole process, from acquisition to prep to cleanup - helps men rebalance their expectations for their primacy in a relationship; a regular act of quotidian service does a power of good in the lifelong process of getting over ourselves.
"The grim pressure of it" - great comment, Frank. When I was married, my husband "liked to cook" Thanksgiving dinner every year. What that meant is that I shopped for all of the ingredients starting three days prior, prepped the turkey, chopped up all of the various stuffing ingredients etc . On Thanksgiving Day, my husband would slip the prepped turkey out of the fridge, throw some spices on it, cook up the prepped stuffing ingredients and all of the guests would say "OOOOOooooohhh, Arch, this is SO GOOOOOOOD." :-(
Ooof ... I feel seen. Not that I'd take credit for others' work, but it seems like whenever I cook something for friends or family, people go out of their way to rave about it, whereas when my wife is the head chef of a particular meal, it's treated with polite praise. And she's a much better cook than I am. It's all about clearing an extremely low bar for men, which frankly I find a bit patronizing. Like, when all I did was whip up some burgers, I don't expect to be compared to Bobby Flay. Save it for when I make my from-scratch chicken tinga enchiladas or fried green tomatoes that actually should blow your mind.
Oh, be damned to that! What an embarrassing display. And if your guests didn't have the decency to say it, I will: thank you for making Thanksgiving dinner, Julie.
"food preparation a part of the courtship": takes me back to when a male friend (I was *not* single at the time) invited me over for a birthday dinner. He cooked for me. Several courses. Reader, I fell hard. Resulted in a 2.5-year-long affair that was painful for us both to end.
Twenty years later, we are still? again? friends. I am happily married; he is unhappily married to a woman who adores him. We dare not ever cook together.
During our courtship my now-husband and I cooked together a lot. We started long distance and were both traveling a lot for work and eating out all the time by necessity. When we were apart we would plan all the slow-cooking elaborate prep things we could cook together when we had time. So like, a very romantic weekend was making bone broth or simmering risotto for ages. We did the planning, shopping, prep and clean up all together. Much more fun than toiling all day alone to serve him something later.
I think there is though--their side of the game is called “I Can Fix That For You” and it revolves around car or home repair. BUT a lot of women don’t know that’s the woo pitch, and don’t realize that when he still leaves a mess for you to clean up or didn’t read instructions or did it wrong that there’s a message there--No, don’t bother with him.
Wow, this article just stopped me in my tracks. I see so much of my experience in it. When I started dating in my early 40s, I was constantly exhausted from navigating between being a feminist and dating men. Even my feminist friends told me that he should be paying for meals, which made me deeply uncomfortable. No matter what I did, I was uncomfortable. If I went along with him paying for all the meals I felt uncomfortable. If I paid, I worried about his discomfort about my paying. Finally we talked about it, he expressed that he didn't care if I paid for meals and ever since then we've taken turns paying for dates.
I also recognize that I genuinely dislike cooking. I'm constantly trying to cook meals, which I tell myself is my way of contributing to the relationship (he cooks and enjoys doing it). But I think deep down, I'm concerned that by not liking cooking I am a. not feminine enough and therefore b. not marriageable. My cooking is trying to prove something about me, even though I truly don't like it. And even though there is no concern about men being marriageable if they don't cook.
I may need to read this article a few times to get at all my subconscious thoughts about food, feminism, gender roles and dating.
Boy are people gonna freak when they hear about "let's have a threesome baby back ribs," "please change your politics as they make you unsexy to me frittatas" and "we need to have a serious conversation about your spending habits chili."
One of the things I resent about patriarchy is the way that it not only consigns both caretaking and passivity to people identified as female or femme, but that it then devalues both caretaking and receiving care. The only thing that's valued is this mythological ability to be totally independent and completely self-sufficient. WHO THE FUCK REALLY IS THAT? And if they are, how fucking happy are they really?
I push back against all of this when I date by asking that when we eat out we take turns paying, so that everyone gets a chance to offer and receive care. Same goes for cooking for each other. I'm less strict about the back and forth of that, but I definitely keep a tally in my head and if I've been doing the labor for a bit I will absolutely ask that the person I'm dating make the meal. I'm a single mom of two children with a full-time job and a vocation. I am constantly under-nurtured, so fuck if I'm going to resist receiving care to prove something, while at the same time I am totally able to take care of other people and enjoy it when I love them. If taking turns giving and receiving care, particularly around food, is something they resist then that's a deal breaker.
Also, I don't think I've baked a chicken since my marriage ended. What an unnecessary and uninteresting PITA from a culinary standpoint.
Also, you make such a good point about women needing and receiving care. It's interesting how in the animal kingdom it's usually the men providing the meals for the females (which is a REALLY REDUCTIVE ANALYSIS, I KNOW, I KNOW). I think as a single mom dating, it's hard for me to accept care and where to find it.
It is SO HARD. I don't want to feel beholden. I don't want to be perceived as needy or incapable. And yet, I am drowning in other people's needs and my various obligations all the time. I've finally accepted that if I don't make myself ask for care and insist on systems in my relationships that ensure that care then any intimacy I get is potentially ruined by my own resentment. And the constantly back-burner simmering of resentment is toxicity I want even less than I ever want to be legally married again.
Oh phew I have some stories we could swap. But I was dating a really good person in 2020 but I broke up with him because I was caring for kids, and my job, and everything, and he was incapable of just showing up and caring for me in a very material way even when I asked for it. And it broke me. Because I was like, I can't have you be one more dependent in my life. AND YET, it's hard for me to trust care and nurturing when it does happen. Don't worry, I have a good therapist. But it's a lot to navigate. And it's like if we handle it all ourselves (which we have to do), we are too independent and aggressive. But if we ask for help from partners, we are needy freeloaders. A stigma that's especially poignant when you are a single mom and the stereotype is that you are out there looking for a man to help you. I stg.
It's funny. I just ended a relationship with someone who was really good at taking care of me in concrete ways. He cooked for me. He fixed shit. But he was also a really high-functioning alcoholic who wasn't able to be fully emotionally present as a result, and that ended up being the nurturing that I needed more than not having to make dinner for myself once a week. This question of what nurtures us, how we ask for it, and whether we get it never seems to have a final answer. But I think it's still a worthy question to ask.
I also think learning to ask for it is very hard. And knowing that most often we don't get what we need when we ask for it and being willing to walk away when a relationship isn't giving us what we need.
Amen! What I hope for (and work for in my own relationships to the extent that I can affect things) is that we all find relationships where we get what we need when we ask for it. It seems like such a low bar, but you gotta start somewhere, I guess.
Airfryer is undefeated for chicken preparation. Sliced cabbage on a cookie sheet ain't bad either.
Accepting care is so wild. I think the concept of love languages is silly at best but I appreciate we all have different modes of showing and appreciation for care. It's a little like is saying "this is SO good" more important than saying "thank you" is more important than doing than dishes is more important than grocery shopping. OK. Off to tell my partner thanks and see if there are any dishes needing done...
This care thing is HUGE. This comment is helping me realize that the reason I can’t seem to get over someone I dated years ago is that he actually provided the trappings of it (cooking meals, checking in, general all around coziness) and I needed that so badly that I ignored some HUGE emotional unavailability red flags because I just couldn’t fathom those two things cohabitating in one body.
I remember in high school, in the 1970s, I went on a date with some boy and I wanted to split the check. He got mad and said "I wouldn't have asked you out if I didn't like you!" and I thought, "what's that got to do with anything?" And I still don't know what that's got to do with anything, but I did come to learn that "who pays" is really fraught.
Yeah, there isn't a right answer. And I hate how I feel like if I bring it up, I'm too aggressive. But if I don't bring it up, I'm a freeloader? I decided to always bring it up even if that made things uncomfortable, because if I were the guy, I'd want me to, and also, sometimes, I'm the one who did the asking out. And I figure, if they think that's too aggressive, wait until they really get to know me.
If a guy is uncomfortable with a woman bringing up the possibility of splitting the check, that says a lot more about him than he realizes, and is actually a bright red flag that more insecurity hurdles are ahead on the path.
My FIL and husband both always like to pay and don’t like to accept money from anyone. My BILs aren’t like this, I know they split checks with their wives when they were dating. I discussed with my husband why he never wanted me to pay when we were dating (he was 29, I was 23 when we got together). he said he had been working for years and I was in law school so he didn’t want me to be stressed. But I have to think if I was dating now as a 35 yo attorney rather than a 23 yo law student I would bring it up again!
It was fraught then. It remains fraught today, but using our words does take the edge off. And hey, you have a tidy parable to share with your next date, no matter how the tab is settled, right?
My daughter proposed to her husband. He said yes. Neither of them changed their names when they married. They had a baby and my son-in-law was overwhelmed and had no idea how to take care of his infant child. Neither did my daughter, really. They were learning together. One day I sat there and watched my son-in-law "get it." He said, "I don't know how to do this, could you..." Then he stopped and said, "No, I have to figure this out. It's not her job to teach me." That's when I was sure he was a good one.
Loved this post. I genuinely had to click on each link because I was in disbelief that these were real topics of recent “articles”. My partner cooks - because he likes cooking and I don’t- and all the women in my life can’t stop telling me how lucky I am and how he basically walks on water. It’s real cute. I’m not furious at all.
For most of our marriage, my husband has done all the laundry. I hate doing laundry. When other women heard this, they’d say things like, Oh, I’d never let my husband do my laundry! I’d always laugh. “*Let* him?! You think it’s such a treat to wash your dirty drawers?” was my response to that — sometimes even out loud.
I think that's because two generations of TV commercials have ingrained in us the idea that if a man gets near the washing machine, every load turns pink and causes chronic itchiness because the concept of fabric softener is too lofty for his dense brain.
When we first got together, I had a couple of white cotton bras with no hooks that I loved. He washed them with his jeans and turned them blue. I was annoyed for a split second – about how long it took me to realize I’d rather wear blue bras than do my own laundry.
Yeah there is a whole other essay in letting go of control that’s about balancing our ideas of doing things the right way and also getting some gd partnership
It’s old now but I’m not gonna call it dated because I think it fundamentally holds up: Rhona Mahony published Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies and Bargaining Power in 1995; she asserted that most cis-het women have done all the negotiating about housework and childcare they’re ever going to do by the time the sun sets on their wedding day. She spends the rest of the book backing that up and explaining how to change it.
My husband also likes to cook and one of my friends said she thought he was the perfect husband bc he does all the grocery shopping and cooks 2-3 meals a week. Like what?! My sisters husband is also the primary cook but we still take on more childcare tasks than them. Cooking is a lot but it irks me that he gets SO much praise for it. Like he lived alone for close to a decade before we got married, I hope he could cook!
I saw that Marry Me Chicken, and thought I didn't know of one single woman who would be up for seducing a man with house work. Not one! And then, a few days later I was hit with this: I've been putting together a cookbook for my daughter who graduates this year, and my son who is a freshman in high school. It's mostly their favorite things I make with a few "impress your friends" recipes I know they can do with a little practice. I love to cook (unless it's expected of me cuz no one tells me what to do) and since I have to be gluten-free, I get to make what I really want, safely. I've also been teaching both kids to cook since they were tiny so they can feed themselves without resorting to fast food, though they will certainly do that as is their god given American right. So when I was writing out the recipe for parmesan risotto and I added the note, "This is what made me fall in love with your father" I promptly realized he was the cook during our courtship, and once the gender roles started to slip into traditional (after kids, when I was working part-time) I became the cook. As I said, I like to cook but I did not like that reminder that it's become my job. That night I asked him to cook dinner. He made that risotto. I love that risotto, but dude needs to step it up.
I once slept with a lovely guy despite the fact that he insisted on making me eggplant for our first date. But he did have an off-campus apartment with a bordello bathroom, so I found forgiveness. :)
In other words, eggplant? A complicated choice. Bordello bathrooms? The best choice.
I increase my word power every time there's a new MYaM story, and so thanks very much for saving "bordello bathroom" to my hard drive. I am agnostic on eggplant, but wow-wee, if I had a bordello bathroom, I'd be way too busy (and way WAY too content) to date anyone but myself.
Would bathe again / would tell a friend (to get their own)...
In a pre-netflix era I dated a guy for like 4 months because he would cook or order in when I came over and owned the full DVD box set of a TV show I loved. Also an off-campus apartment, lol!
My wife and I have been married for forty-three years. The stay married chicken is the one you get at Costco for five bucks. BTW, I do almost all the cooking at our house.
The whole discourse about who asks out whom, who pays for dates, who proposes, etc., is really troubling/fascinating to me. It’s part of why I’ve always hated the whole wedding industrial complex (well, the patriarchy *and* the class dynamics). The history and symbolism of most American wedding traditions are rooted in male dominance, even though most of the legal elements of marriage have changed. Even as a 21-year-old ‘bride’, I hated it: we were married by a judge, in the same courtroom where he held traffic court, and only immediate family knew and were invited. And they were told the day before.
When I hear people talking about weddings and wedding planning these days, it seems younger people are more caught up in it than my generation ever was, which supports your point about the feminist backlash. Maybe (probably) I’m an outlier. We wanted to be married more than we wanted a wedding. Back then it came with a tax deduction! 😆
Maaaaaany, many years ago, I made a nice meal for someone's birthday. I would make it when we would have guests over for the first time. (Proof in old photos.) When we had kids, it became the go-to meal for special occasions (although, for the longest time, they preferred spaghetti over anything else). Then, about four years ago, after the ex had been love-bombing a new narcissistic supply for a couple of months, he asked one of my kids to get the recipe for him. I think it was February ... so, you know ... Valentine's Day was coming up. He KNEW the kid would have to ask me. Dunno whether he actually made the dish for her or if it was all just performative to let me know he was up to "special things" with his new victim. They were married three months later, so ... who knows. He can call it Marry Me with my Ex-Wife's Special Meal. Ah, food. It really IS about more than food.
I find this so fascinating! My husband and I share the cooking labor pretty evenly, but even so I have feelings about my ability to feed him well that don’t total match my feminist beliefs. Something for me to unpack!
Also, on a semi-unrelated note, I love that there’s almost the opposite tradition or superstition in knitting where if you knit your partner a sweater you’ll break up. The prevailing thought is that no one can fully appreciate a hand knit sweater other than a knitter and it will sour your romantic relationship.
I have heard this before. But I didn't hear it until AFTER I knit my now husband the worst sweater known to humankind. I mean it was ill-fitting and made of terrible yarn. Maybe this adage only works if the knitted piece is lovely? Ha!
All my favorite cultural history elements! If you haven't read it, you might find Carol J. Adams' book The Sexual Politics of Meat interesting—it was written during the second wave & became a very important Animal Studies & feminist text.
I’ll have to dig up an old syllabus to find the citations, but in the early and mid-0ughts I assigned a couple of academic articles about the way food is gendered in US culture; I may have even assigned a few pages from Adams, because the analysis clearly had its genesis in her work. At the time we were discussing this in my classes, there was a proliferation of TV ads emphasizing masculinity of foods: Burger King was especially prominent. There was also a diet Dr. Pepper for men that was somehow different to regular Dr Pepper, yogurt for men, and memes based on the popular category of stock photos called “Women Laughing and Eating Salad”.
The idea of manly diet soda always killed me. "Fellas, are you trying to cut down on sugar, but you're afraid your low-calorie cola will make you gay? Have I got the drink for you ..." It wouldn't have ever reached the market if there hadn't been some level of demand for it.
This reminds me of man wipes. I’m like my dude, you’re paying 4x for baby wipes because of your fragile masculinity. I don’t feel bad for you and I support this capitalism.
My husband is a big salad eater and I am not. In restaurants our meals often get swapped when delivered. My husband gets weirdly mad about this every time. He will not be denied a Salmon Ceasar Salad by the patriarchy, dammit!
When I was dating, I always paid half because I wanted to be able to walk away at the end of the date without feeling like the guy was going to think I owed him something. I would leave in my nightstand drawer all the info I had on the guy I was out with, for my sisters to go and get in case something happened. I would call them post date to let them know I was home. We had a code phrase so that if I felt unsafe at home & they called, they knew to come over immediately (we lived in the same condo building on different floors). Sad that women have to take so many precautions and do so much preplanning to ensure some modicum of safety. When I started dating my now husband, there were many signs he was a “grown-up” and an equal: he had furnished his apartment with tasteful furniture and it was immaculate (he even owned a vacuum!!!); he did his own laundry, his finances were in order, he was employed, had a car & insurance & knew how to cook. The first meal he made for me was chicken breasts pounded flat, rolled up in a lasagna noodle with spinach, ricotta & mozzarella, covered in a white sauce with a green salad & garlic bread. WOW. I was blown away. When we started talking marriage, it was to plan together: the ring, the engagement, his wedding ring, the wedding, kids or no kids. It was all done together as partners. I appreciate and value him so much. We are truly a team. It’s not the poor girl waits for Prince Charming scenario or a “The Bachelor” scenario with the woman striving to prove herself worthy of the swain who struts around.
I love this
YES. "I wanted to be able to walk away at the end of the date without feeling like the guy was going to think I owed him something." This is why I always hated dating. Yet another feeling of obligation that I didn't need.
Sounds a lot like my husband except the furniture- we still live in the house he lived in with his brothers and I changed a lot of decor! He is a great cook, the first meal he ever made me was chicken pot pie, but I really liked when he made me the Iranian dish ghormeh sabzi and shared that part of his upbringing with me. He made it for me the night before my scheduled c section as my last meal before the fasting!
I was a very old first time bride. Like 45 when we got engaged. And my husband is a little younger, but also a fully functioning grown up. My husband is an active member of the most liberal Catholic parish in DC. So even though we were getting married in my very liberal Protestant church with my female pastor, we end up at pre Cana at his church. And while I was probably the oldest woman there, not by that much. We had to tell our engagement stories. We didn’t have one. We just mutually decided we were doing it. Also buying a house together. The two other couples I liked the most had similar stories. The more elaborate the engagement story, the less a marriage of equals it seemed.
'I joked that there was no equivalent for men. No, “End Male Loneliness Eggplant Parmesan.” No “Get the Girlfriend Gnocchi.”'
TOO RIGHT, and there damn well should be. There can be such satisfaction and joy in wooing someone through food; I would imagine this effect is exaggerated for men because we aren't socialized to feel the grim pressure of it. It seems to me that making food preparation a part of the courtship - and I mean the whole process, from acquisition to prep to cleanup - helps men rebalance their expectations for their primacy in a relationship; a regular act of quotidian service does a power of good in the lifelong process of getting over ourselves.
Frank, this is an excellent comment.
"The grim pressure of it" - great comment, Frank. When I was married, my husband "liked to cook" Thanksgiving dinner every year. What that meant is that I shopped for all of the ingredients starting three days prior, prepped the turkey, chopped up all of the various stuffing ingredients etc . On Thanksgiving Day, my husband would slip the prepped turkey out of the fridge, throw some spices on it, cook up the prepped stuffing ingredients and all of the guests would say "OOOOOooooohhh, Arch, this is SO GOOOOOOOD." :-(
Ooof ... I feel seen. Not that I'd take credit for others' work, but it seems like whenever I cook something for friends or family, people go out of their way to rave about it, whereas when my wife is the head chef of a particular meal, it's treated with polite praise. And she's a much better cook than I am. It's all about clearing an extremely low bar for men, which frankly I find a bit patronizing. Like, when all I did was whip up some burgers, I don't expect to be compared to Bobby Flay. Save it for when I make my from-scratch chicken tinga enchiladas or fried green tomatoes that actually should blow your mind.
Oh, be damned to that! What an embarrassing display. And if your guests didn't have the decency to say it, I will: thank you for making Thanksgiving dinner, Julie.
Well, thanks, Frank!
"food preparation a part of the courtship": takes me back to when a male friend (I was *not* single at the time) invited me over for a birthday dinner. He cooked for me. Several courses. Reader, I fell hard. Resulted in a 2.5-year-long affair that was painful for us both to end.
Twenty years later, we are still? again? friends. I am happily married; he is unhappily married to a woman who adores him. We dare not ever cook together.
During our courtship my now-husband and I cooked together a lot. We started long distance and were both traveling a lot for work and eating out all the time by necessity. When we were apart we would plan all the slow-cooking elaborate prep things we could cook together when we had time. So like, a very romantic weekend was making bone broth or simmering risotto for ages. We did the planning, shopping, prep and clean up all together. Much more fun than toiling all day alone to serve him something later.
I think there is though--their side of the game is called “I Can Fix That For You” and it revolves around car or home repair. BUT a lot of women don’t know that’s the woo pitch, and don’t realize that when he still leaves a mess for you to clean up or didn’t read instructions or did it wrong that there’s a message there--No, don’t bother with him.
Or, that’s me. Definitely that is me.
I think you're right, Kerry!
Wow, this article just stopped me in my tracks. I see so much of my experience in it. When I started dating in my early 40s, I was constantly exhausted from navigating between being a feminist and dating men. Even my feminist friends told me that he should be paying for meals, which made me deeply uncomfortable. No matter what I did, I was uncomfortable. If I went along with him paying for all the meals I felt uncomfortable. If I paid, I worried about his discomfort about my paying. Finally we talked about it, he expressed that he didn't care if I paid for meals and ever since then we've taken turns paying for dates.
I also recognize that I genuinely dislike cooking. I'm constantly trying to cook meals, which I tell myself is my way of contributing to the relationship (he cooks and enjoys doing it). But I think deep down, I'm concerned that by not liking cooking I am a. not feminine enough and therefore b. not marriageable. My cooking is trying to prove something about me, even though I truly don't like it. And even though there is no concern about men being marriageable if they don't cook.
I may need to read this article a few times to get at all my subconscious thoughts about food, feminism, gender roles and dating.
Boy are people gonna freak when they hear about "let's have a threesome baby back ribs," "please change your politics as they make you unsexy to me frittatas" and "we need to have a serious conversation about your spending habits chili."
This might as well have been called Slut-Shaming Chicken, cuz everyone knows that good girls are always aiming to win a hubby.
Most popular dish in my area is Male Insecurity Brisket. Best served with Performative Masculinity Bourbon and no vegetables.
lol. Somewhere out there, there's a really good-looking couple that is completely sick and tired of the food they make for each other...
LOL
“You didn’t do the dishes PB&J”
One of the things I resent about patriarchy is the way that it not only consigns both caretaking and passivity to people identified as female or femme, but that it then devalues both caretaking and receiving care. The only thing that's valued is this mythological ability to be totally independent and completely self-sufficient. WHO THE FUCK REALLY IS THAT? And if they are, how fucking happy are they really?
I push back against all of this when I date by asking that when we eat out we take turns paying, so that everyone gets a chance to offer and receive care. Same goes for cooking for each other. I'm less strict about the back and forth of that, but I definitely keep a tally in my head and if I've been doing the labor for a bit I will absolutely ask that the person I'm dating make the meal. I'm a single mom of two children with a full-time job and a vocation. I am constantly under-nurtured, so fuck if I'm going to resist receiving care to prove something, while at the same time I am totally able to take care of other people and enjoy it when I love them. If taking turns giving and receiving care, particularly around food, is something they resist then that's a deal breaker.
Also, I don't think I've baked a chicken since my marriage ended. What an unnecessary and uninteresting PITA from a culinary standpoint.
I love to roast a chicken but as we all know the real Engagement Chicken is Helen Rosner's roast chicken with schmaltzy cabbage. https://smittenkitchen.com/2020/04/roast-chicken-with-schmaltzy-cabbage/
Also, you make such a good point about women needing and receiving care. It's interesting how in the animal kingdom it's usually the men providing the meals for the females (which is a REALLY REDUCTIVE ANALYSIS, I KNOW, I KNOW). I think as a single mom dating, it's hard for me to accept care and where to find it.
It is SO HARD. I don't want to feel beholden. I don't want to be perceived as needy or incapable. And yet, I am drowning in other people's needs and my various obligations all the time. I've finally accepted that if I don't make myself ask for care and insist on systems in my relationships that ensure that care then any intimacy I get is potentially ruined by my own resentment. And the constantly back-burner simmering of resentment is toxicity I want even less than I ever want to be legally married again.
Oh phew I have some stories we could swap. But I was dating a really good person in 2020 but I broke up with him because I was caring for kids, and my job, and everything, and he was incapable of just showing up and caring for me in a very material way even when I asked for it. And it broke me. Because I was like, I can't have you be one more dependent in my life. AND YET, it's hard for me to trust care and nurturing when it does happen. Don't worry, I have a good therapist. But it's a lot to navigate. And it's like if we handle it all ourselves (which we have to do), we are too independent and aggressive. But if we ask for help from partners, we are needy freeloaders. A stigma that's especially poignant when you are a single mom and the stereotype is that you are out there looking for a man to help you. I stg.
It's funny. I just ended a relationship with someone who was really good at taking care of me in concrete ways. He cooked for me. He fixed shit. But he was also a really high-functioning alcoholic who wasn't able to be fully emotionally present as a result, and that ended up being the nurturing that I needed more than not having to make dinner for myself once a week. This question of what nurtures us, how we ask for it, and whether we get it never seems to have a final answer. But I think it's still a worthy question to ask.
I also think learning to ask for it is very hard. And knowing that most often we don't get what we need when we ask for it and being willing to walk away when a relationship isn't giving us what we need.
Those are the lessons I've learned.
Amen! What I hope for (and work for in my own relationships to the extent that I can affect things) is that we all find relationships where we get what we need when we ask for it. It seems like such a low bar, but you gotta start somewhere, I guess.
Airfryer is undefeated for chicken preparation. Sliced cabbage on a cookie sheet ain't bad either.
Accepting care is so wild. I think the concept of love languages is silly at best but I appreciate we all have different modes of showing and appreciation for care. It's a little like is saying "this is SO good" more important than saying "thank you" is more important than doing than dishes is more important than grocery shopping. OK. Off to tell my partner thanks and see if there are any dishes needing done...
This care thing is HUGE. This comment is helping me realize that the reason I can’t seem to get over someone I dated years ago is that he actually provided the trappings of it (cooking meals, checking in, general all around coziness) and I needed that so badly that I ignored some HUGE emotional unavailability red flags because I just couldn’t fathom those two things cohabitating in one body.
Yes! I totally understand that. You deserve all the things, though-- care AND emotional availability. So do I.
I remember in high school, in the 1970s, I went on a date with some boy and I wanted to split the check. He got mad and said "I wouldn't have asked you out if I didn't like you!" and I thought, "what's that got to do with anything?" And I still don't know what that's got to do with anything, but I did come to learn that "who pays" is really fraught.
Yeah, there isn't a right answer. And I hate how I feel like if I bring it up, I'm too aggressive. But if I don't bring it up, I'm a freeloader? I decided to always bring it up even if that made things uncomfortable, because if I were the guy, I'd want me to, and also, sometimes, I'm the one who did the asking out. And I figure, if they think that's too aggressive, wait until they really get to know me.
If a guy is uncomfortable with a woman bringing up the possibility of splitting the check, that says a lot more about him than he realizes, and is actually a bright red flag that more insecurity hurdles are ahead on the path.
My FIL and husband both always like to pay and don’t like to accept money from anyone. My BILs aren’t like this, I know they split checks with their wives when they were dating. I discussed with my husband why he never wanted me to pay when we were dating (he was 29, I was 23 when we got together). he said he had been working for years and I was in law school so he didn’t want me to be stressed. But I have to think if I was dating now as a 35 yo attorney rather than a 23 yo law student I would bring it up again!
It was fraught then. It remains fraught today, but using our words does take the edge off. And hey, you have a tidy parable to share with your next date, no matter how the tab is settled, right?
My daughter proposed to her husband. He said yes. Neither of them changed their names when they married. They had a baby and my son-in-law was overwhelmed and had no idea how to take care of his infant child. Neither did my daughter, really. They were learning together. One day I sat there and watched my son-in-law "get it." He said, "I don't know how to do this, could you..." Then he stopped and said, "No, I have to figure this out. It's not her job to teach me." That's when I was sure he was a good one.
Neither of them can cook.
Loved this post. I genuinely had to click on each link because I was in disbelief that these were real topics of recent “articles”. My partner cooks - because he likes cooking and I don’t- and all the women in my life can’t stop telling me how lucky I am and how he basically walks on water. It’s real cute. I’m not furious at all.
For most of our marriage, my husband has done all the laundry. I hate doing laundry. When other women heard this, they’d say things like, Oh, I’d never let my husband do my laundry! I’d always laugh. “*Let* him?! You think it’s such a treat to wash your dirty drawers?” was my response to that — sometimes even out loud.
I think that's because two generations of TV commercials have ingrained in us the idea that if a man gets near the washing machine, every load turns pink and causes chronic itchiness because the concept of fabric softener is too lofty for his dense brain.
When we first got together, I had a couple of white cotton bras with no hooks that I loved. He washed them with his jeans and turned them blue. I was annoyed for a split second – about how long it took me to realize I’d rather wear blue bras than do my own laundry.
Yeah there is a whole other essay in letting go of control that’s about balancing our ideas of doing things the right way and also getting some gd partnership
Definitely. There’s a whole book about it.
It’s old now but I’m not gonna call it dated because I think it fundamentally holds up: Rhona Mahony published Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies and Bargaining Power in 1995; she asserted that most cis-het women have done all the negotiating about housework and childcare they’re ever going to do by the time the sun sets on their wedding day. She spends the rest of the book backing that up and explaining how to change it.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/kidding-ourselves-breadwinning-babies-and-bargaining-power-rhona-mahony/16438008
My husband also likes to cook and one of my friends said she thought he was the perfect husband bc he does all the grocery shopping and cooks 2-3 meals a week. Like what?! My sisters husband is also the primary cook but we still take on more childcare tasks than them. Cooking is a lot but it irks me that he gets SO much praise for it. Like he lived alone for close to a decade before we got married, I hope he could cook!
I saw that Marry Me Chicken, and thought I didn't know of one single woman who would be up for seducing a man with house work. Not one! And then, a few days later I was hit with this: I've been putting together a cookbook for my daughter who graduates this year, and my son who is a freshman in high school. It's mostly their favorite things I make with a few "impress your friends" recipes I know they can do with a little practice. I love to cook (unless it's expected of me cuz no one tells me what to do) and since I have to be gluten-free, I get to make what I really want, safely. I've also been teaching both kids to cook since they were tiny so they can feed themselves without resorting to fast food, though they will certainly do that as is their god given American right. So when I was writing out the recipe for parmesan risotto and I added the note, "This is what made me fall in love with your father" I promptly realized he was the cook during our courtship, and once the gender roles started to slip into traditional (after kids, when I was working part-time) I became the cook. As I said, I like to cook but I did not like that reminder that it's become my job. That night I asked him to cook dinner. He made that risotto. I love that risotto, but dude needs to step it up.
I just read a recipe for Coconut Saag on the NYT maybe he could make it and rebrand it as Sexytime Saag. Just an idea!!
Women have Engagement Chicken, men have Sleep with Me Nachos
END MALE LONELINESS EGGPLANT PARMESEAN
I once slept with a lovely guy despite the fact that he insisted on making me eggplant for our first date. But he did have an off-campus apartment with a bordello bathroom, so I found forgiveness. :)
In other words, eggplant? A complicated choice. Bordello bathrooms? The best choice.
I increase my word power every time there's a new MYaM story, and so thanks very much for saving "bordello bathroom" to my hard drive. I am agnostic on eggplant, but wow-wee, if I had a bordello bathroom, I'd be way too busy (and way WAY too content) to date anyone but myself.
Would bathe again / would tell a friend (to get their own)...
In a pre-netflix era I dated a guy for like 4 months because he would cook or order in when I came over and owned the full DVD box set of a TV show I loved. Also an off-campus apartment, lol!
Hungry Man Incel Salisbury Steak
My wife and I have been married for forty-three years. The stay married chicken is the one you get at Costco for five bucks. BTW, I do almost all the cooking at our house.
The whole discourse about who asks out whom, who pays for dates, who proposes, etc., is really troubling/fascinating to me. It’s part of why I’ve always hated the whole wedding industrial complex (well, the patriarchy *and* the class dynamics). The history and symbolism of most American wedding traditions are rooted in male dominance, even though most of the legal elements of marriage have changed. Even as a 21-year-old ‘bride’, I hated it: we were married by a judge, in the same courtroom where he held traffic court, and only immediate family knew and were invited. And they were told the day before.
When I hear people talking about weddings and wedding planning these days, it seems younger people are more caught up in it than my generation ever was, which supports your point about the feminist backlash. Maybe (probably) I’m an outlier. We wanted to be married more than we wanted a wedding. Back then it came with a tax deduction! 😆
I was secretly thrilled to have the excuse of a global pandemic to not have to have a wedding 🙊
Maaaaaany, many years ago, I made a nice meal for someone's birthday. I would make it when we would have guests over for the first time. (Proof in old photos.) When we had kids, it became the go-to meal for special occasions (although, for the longest time, they preferred spaghetti over anything else). Then, about four years ago, after the ex had been love-bombing a new narcissistic supply for a couple of months, he asked one of my kids to get the recipe for him. I think it was February ... so, you know ... Valentine's Day was coming up. He KNEW the kid would have to ask me. Dunno whether he actually made the dish for her or if it was all just performative to let me know he was up to "special things" with his new victim. They were married three months later, so ... who knows. He can call it Marry Me with my Ex-Wife's Special Meal. Ah, food. It really IS about more than food.
Roland Barthes knew
My first thought was, but what did his wife know? Then I googled him. He died by laundry. Which is a whole chapter of this book. lolol
I still wanna know what dish Travis plans to bring to the Swift Thanksgiving dinner, lol.
Write a Song About Me Wontons
Croon to Me Casserole
You're on a roll this morning. : )
A dinner roll! ba-dum-bum
I find this so fascinating! My husband and I share the cooking labor pretty evenly, but even so I have feelings about my ability to feed him well that don’t total match my feminist beliefs. Something for me to unpack!
Also, on a semi-unrelated note, I love that there’s almost the opposite tradition or superstition in knitting where if you knit your partner a sweater you’ll break up. The prevailing thought is that no one can fully appreciate a hand knit sweater other than a knitter and it will sour your romantic relationship.
I have heard this before. But I didn't hear it until AFTER I knit my now husband the worst sweater known to humankind. I mean it was ill-fitting and made of terrible yarn. Maybe this adage only works if the knitted piece is lovely? Ha!
I knit and I did not know this was a thing. Thank you for the warning lol
All my favorite cultural history elements! If you haven't read it, you might find Carol J. Adams' book The Sexual Politics of Meat interesting—it was written during the second wave & became a very important Animal Studies & feminist text.
I’ll have to dig up an old syllabus to find the citations, but in the early and mid-0ughts I assigned a couple of academic articles about the way food is gendered in US culture; I may have even assigned a few pages from Adams, because the analysis clearly had its genesis in her work. At the time we were discussing this in my classes, there was a proliferation of TV ads emphasizing masculinity of foods: Burger King was especially prominent. There was also a diet Dr. Pepper for men that was somehow different to regular Dr Pepper, yogurt for men, and memes based on the popular category of stock photos called “Women Laughing and Eating Salad”.
ahh an excuse to share some of edith zimmerman’s finest work
https://www.thehairpin.com/2011/01/women-laughing-alone-with-salad/
The idea of manly diet soda always killed me. "Fellas, are you trying to cut down on sugar, but you're afraid your low-calorie cola will make you gay? Have I got the drink for you ..." It wouldn't have ever reached the market if there hadn't been some level of demand for it.
This reminds me of man wipes. I’m like my dude, you’re paying 4x for baby wipes because of your fragile masculinity. I don’t feel bad for you and I support this capitalism.
My husband is a big salad eater and I am not. In restaurants our meals often get swapped when delivered. My husband gets weirdly mad about this every time. He will not be denied a Salmon Ceasar Salad by the patriarchy, dammit!
ooooh thank you!
Ooooh, adding to my TBR list!