Can love withstand a carnivore-vegan household divided by meat?
My eyes spotted the bowl of pho emerging through the kitchen doors, leaving a tail of fragrant steam as it floated past a dozen diners and settled gently on the table in front of me. In that moment, I forgot what my girlfriend and I were chatting about — it was time to dote on the noodles. I caressed them with my chopsticks, teased a spoonful of broth and rapidly decorated the bowl with chile sauce, basil leaves and a thicket of bean sprouts.
Finished with the foreplay, I grabbed an inch-wide cluster of noodles and greedily slurped it into my mouth. Perfect, I thought, pinching more noodles and inhaling them like I was a drowning man who had just tasted fresh air. Shhhhhlllluuuuurp.
But then I felt a gaze on the top of my head. I looked up and was greeted by my girlfriend’s face, contorted into a look of disgust and perhaps a touch of pity.
“Eddie,” she deadpanned.
“Slurping noodles is respectful and totally normal in a lot of other cultures,” I sputtered.
“You know it drives me crazy,” she replied.
This, in our sixth month of dating (with just as many noodle-slurping incidents), I couldn’t deny. It drove me nuts that she, an otherwise wonderful (white) girlfriend, would be bothered by something so minute — and an act rooted in my Asian heritage. The annoyance didn’t quite dissipate when I remembered how much of a waste of time it would be to argue. I sat there, silently biting my noodles, wondering why the heck I was capitulating. Satisfied, her attention returned to her bowl, but I knew those ears were waiting to catch another slurp.
Being Korean-American, I grew up used to certain sounds and gestures of eating good food: Sucking on bones, crunching through cartilage, sharing from communal pots of stew and slurping up noodles with earnest gusto. It didn’t take much time in adulthood to discover most of my romantic interests weren’t accustomed to that, and my puzzlement at their lack of “cultural acceptance” has faded into a sort of shrugging, I’m-still-right-but-whatever deference to American norms on polite dining.
Of course, couples bickering over their eating habits is an old punchline, whether it’s because their tastes are naturally different or one person can never seem to pick a place. On first glance, this may seem like a small speed bump amid other questions of personality, fidelity and life goals. But many people discover that what began as a simple fight at the grocery store or some teasing about a favorite dish can grow into an existential crisis — one that makes you wonder whether a person’s “worst” eating habits reflect something intrinsic about them, and therefore, their compatibility with you.
“I’ve seen people that are so different on the spectrum, and they end up with a broken relationship because there’s no compromise. They pretty much have separate lives because of food, and it eventually creates a lot of resentment,” says Amie Leadingham, a master-certified dating coach based in L.A. “It starts building some resentment in your soul because of the fact that you’re not connecting to your partner the same way.”
For Christa Sonido and Tobi Vollebregt, who live together in San Francisco, the act of eating didn’t seem like a red flag early in their courtship — going out on dates meant eating out at restaurants, which offered plenty of choice. But when they moved in together after a year, they discovered sharp differences in the way they treated food.
Sonido had grown up in Hawaii, with a food-obsessed Filipino family and a local cuisine that favored big portions and intense, multicultural flavors. The Netherlands-raised Vollebregt, meanwhile, was accustomed to a much more austere diet, viewing food as sustenance rather than pleasure. Every day as a child, he ate a simple breakfast and lunch (a bowl of cereal and a cheese sandwich, perhaps), plus a balanced dinner cooked by his mother. Sonido, meanwhile, ate more frequently at restaurants and at much more indulgent group outings…
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https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-ultimate-food-fight-when-you-and-your-partner-have-completely-different-diets
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