The Restructuring — One Angry Waitress

With every new relationship I find there is a period where the both of you sort of have to realize where you fit and the things that need to change for it to work, and for me the biggest part of that is food.

If left to my own devices I will eat all of my meals standing over the kitchen sink, one hip dug into the counter as I ponder why the rest of the world doesn’t also think that lentils are a fine stand-in for all of the food groups. But when living with someone who actually eats meals and is not content to eat a handful of pickles and call that lunch I have to rethink my entire approach to eating.

I admit that I like cooking, I just won’t do it if it’s only for me. Last summer I spent a couple of months in Central Europe and my diet basically consisted of vegetable soup, salad and gummy bears. I assume this is how models do it: they live alone so that there is no one around to tell them that their spine looks more like a weapon than the integral column of bones that is holding the rest of them up. I felt fantastic, but I looked like I was about to start haunting the apartment floor that I was living on.

Now that I live with someone I’m back to normal meals, or as normal as someone can be after spending ten days in France: an entire country of people who start off with a cheese course at eight and eat dinner at ten pm. So we’ve met in the middle and tend to eat at around seven.

After we sorted the issue of meals, the other issues seemed insignificant, such as: what a top sheet was meant for, that unless it’s a cactus I will inevitably kill whatever type of fauna you bring into the house, that I am not one properly-marinated-steak away from eating beef again, and that girls do not actually eat toilet paper but it does somehow disappear at a rapid rate when we live in your house

So we’ve been navigating: trying to figure out how best to share a meal even though the things we’re consuming are sometimes vastly different. I can no longer count the individual vertebrae of my spine and he understands that wrapping food in bacon renders them inedible to me. It’s going well I think, even though there is still the occasion bump in the road. And though I know it seems insane part of me is still sure I may just kill him if he untucks the top sheet one more time.