Is this marriage?

On cohabitation and dinner.

Manfred Bail/Getty Images

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There are a few truths inherent to any properly committed relationship: that you are loyal in a mutually agreed-upon way; that you are working towards a common life goal; and that, apparently, at around 5:45 in the evening one person will text the other, “What’s the plan for dinner?” 

I never thought I would dread receiving this text from a partner. In fact, there was a time not too long ago that any text from any man would give me a heart palpitation. But now when I see, hear, or read these words—whether texted to me from the other room in the apartment or asked over breakfast—I simply can’t stand it. 

This is not because I am sick of my partner, and not because I don’t love him. And, believe it or not, it is not because I can’t stand the sound of him chewing, which I sometimes do, particularly when he eats schnitzel. It’s because, at its core, I am tired of making a plan for dinner. I am tired of talking about making a dinner plan, doing the actual planning (what groceries will the meal require that we don’t already have, allotting time to purchase those groceries, et cetera), and, finally, spending the time to execute the plan later that day. What I want is to do nothing with no one and not think about anything until I absolutely have to. And that includes dinner. 

This would look very bad if the situation were that my partner expected me to take on the burden of organizing dinner alone, all of the time. You would probably understand my plight not as a question of the institution of domestic partnership, and rather as one of oppression. I should clarify that this is far from the case. There is never even an assumption that I will be the one to shepherd the dinner plan. In fact, I often don’t cook at all during the week because when it comes to anything domestic I have a short attention span, poor time management skills, and get stressed out easily. My partner knows this. So instead I do things like shop, prep, and clear dishes, along with the usual emotional labor. 

I also want to note that I am certainly allowed to have other dinner plans, and there is nothing besides a global pandemic stopping me from doing so. But if we are both home with nothing gridlocked, as one often finds oneself these days, then dinner is always together. Nobody told me to expect this of cohabitation. No parent, rabbi, or mentor tells you: “This is a big step, and you will forgo the ritual of making little separate meals and not speaking much while doing so.” 

Why does everybody spend so much of their college years and early twenties talking about dating, but not what happens after? Why don’t we speak about how you know when you found the one, when you are ready to live together, and that you will have to eat dinner together all of the time? If those conversations are a thing, I think I clearly missed them all.

So while it is nice to have a companion at an otherwise isolating time to exist in the world, and I am grateful to have a built-in someone to safely eat a meal with who I love very much, I miss boiling a sad box of Banza in my underwear, eating the entire thing in no more than six minutes, rinsing my lone bowl, and shutting myself in my room for the night. “Goodbye, world!” I would say and wave to my fans in the living room, the ones we would use because my bachelorette apartment downtown was always 20 degrees warmer than you wanted it to be, no matter the time of year. 

Of course I imagined those days would end eventually. That I would live with a romantic partner, and not just one roommate I studied abroad with and another I met on the Internet, and we would actually share groceries and meals. That we would be a team, and check in about dinner because we wanted to make sure the other was happy, and not just passively coexist because that’s what a loving relationship requires. It’s work. I knew that. I read The Defining Decade. But I had no way of knowing that every day, at 1 p.m. on the hour, someone would ask me what the plan is for dinner, and I would be expected to answer. And to my dismay, he would not be satisfied if that answer was simply, “Trader Joe’s frozen cauliflower gnocchi, again.”