Not too long ago, I asked my readers to help me out with a relationship dilemma of sorts: do I cede territory in the kitchen to Alex from time to time, or don’t I?  The verdict was a resounding “let the man cook,” so last Thursday night I turned over my chef’s knife, in spite of my apprehensions.

Let me just tell you all… it was HARD.  Really hard.  It took every ounce of my self-control to not hover, or supervise, or check on him when I heard banging that made me cringe (banging that turned out to be Alex pounding the chicken tenders).  I squirmed in my chair in the living room.  I tried to distract myself by doing laundry.  When that didn’t work I decided perhaps we ought to open a bottle of wine with dinner.  IT WAS REALLY, REALLY HARD TO STAY OUT OF THAT KITCHEN.

But, it was also important that I let Alex do his own thing, and make what he wanted to make for me, without giving the impression that I had my doubts.  And after the fifth time I reminded myself of this, a miraculous thing happened: I started to smell what he was cooking.  It smelled good!

Alex, as it turns out, was making chicken stir fry with rice and salad, a meal I would be perfectly happy for him to make again from time to time.  Here are a few pictures of the finished product:

Thanks for all your input – you all really helped on this issue!

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I’m a control freak.  I don’t know if this has ever come up before here, but it’s true.

My need to control things doesn’t usually cause major problems in my life.  I like to have things planned out, and I hate surprises, but most of the time it’s not so bad. At least, it was not so bad until Alex and I moved in together almost a year ago, and it started to manifest itself in the most bizarre way ever: in the kitchen.

Just so everyone has some background, there are 3 things you should know about me and my kitchen:

1. It is MY kitchen.  It has been ever since I left college and immediately moved into my own apartment.  I set it up the way  that works for me to cook and bake, and if someone moves something it makes me really cranky.
2. I can get really anal about how my kitchen equipment gets cleaned.  To the point where I don’t want anyone except me to clean that room.
3. I dabbled in catering for a few years before going to graduate school for science, and I worked in a restaurant kitchen for a stint as a prep chef.  This experience gave me some very specific ideas about what does and what does not constitute a decent meal.

When Alex and I were dating, my need to control things in the kitchen wasn’t much of a problem.  I cooked things for him, and I cleaned them up, and he enjoyed it (except for the time I made an herb salad that consisted primarily of parsley… that he didn’t enjoy.  Maybe I will write a post about that one day soon.).  But when we moved in together and got engaged, Alex started to make more noise about my kitchen control issues.

Why would he do that? you might ask.  It’s a good question, and I didn’t really understand it at first, either.  After all, why would any guy question being served home-cooked meals on a regular basis?

The answer, revealed after several disagreements over dinner, is this: Alex likes to cook sometimes.  And he doesn’t like they I don’t really LET him cook.  Oh, he heats up Spaghettio’s occasionally, and he makes a mean slice of toast, but touch my chef’s knife?  I DON’T THINK SO!  He made me dinner on my last birthday, and I ultimately made the poor guy so nervous that he wound up serving me slightly pink chicken.  He has not picked up a pot or pan since.

The fact that I do all the cooking, not because he can’t cook but because I don’t WANT him to cook has been the topic of conversation with some of our friends and family recently.  Bottom line: Alex would like to cook sometimes, but  I simply can’t get past my need to have control over the kitchen all the time.  It’s an impasse.  My mom has suggested I let him cook 1 night per week, but I am so scared I will be served Lipton noodles with chickpeas (an inside joke, sorry), that so far I’ve had trouble stomaching the concept of turning over my apron for an evening.  It’s also been suggested that I could regret discouraging him from cooking down the road, when we have kids running around every day and I don’t have the time/energy to cook a meal.  That one got filed away under “noted.”

So I am taking this quirk to my readers!  Do any of you have a suggestion for how a control freak such as myself can come to terms with “allowing” my future husband to make an occasional dinner or two?  Should he just be thankful I am making dinner at all and let it go?  Is there a middle ground?

Thank you in advance for you help!

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

If you look around the internet, or in magazines, or at news programs on TV, you will probably be hard-pressed to find anyplace that doesn’t list money as a top reason for divorce in the United States.

If you think about this a little bit, it’s not particularly shocking.

Let’s say a young couple (or even a not-so-young couple) gets married.  Everything is fabulous, and they decide they want to have a family, complete with a white picket fence and a neighborhood ice cream truck.  So they buy a house.  Then they have a kid.  Or two, or three.  The kids need STUFF.  The house needs STUFF.  Maybe now they need a new car.  And the couple themselves occasionally need stuff, too.  All these early marriage “stuff” acquisitions means the couple needs money… and may also mean the couple has to go into debt.  If the two people that make up this couple view and handle money differently, there’s a good chance there’s going to be friction, and over time, that it will be a major problem.

Like I said, it’s not shocking that money issues often = divorce.

As a soon-to-be-married person, this type of statistic freaks me out.  I certainly don’t want my marriage to be felled by money.  Money is, to a certain extent (you know, barring prolonged illness, alien invasion, and job loss), something that can be controlled.  So for Alex and I, I figured we could avoid problems if we talked early and often about how we are going to handle our finances as a married couple.

Turns out, I’m kinda dumb for thinking it’s that easy.  Because, when it comes to relationships and money, it’s not easy at all.

For Alex and I, we decided to split joint expenses – things like rent and electricity – according to the disparity in our incomes, but we keep our money separate so we can easily pay our pre-relationship obligations.  This was my idea, and I had read about this method of handling money in relationships in The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke by Suze Orman.  For example (and I’m making these numbers up):

He makes $40,000/year

I make $30,000/year

This means he makes 0.57 more than I do (40,000/70,000).  So if our rent is $1200 a month, he pays 0.57 x $1200, or $684, while I pay $516.

This is supposed to ensure that one person isn’t paying so much that all their income is gone every month, while the other person has tons to spare.  It has worked pretty well for us thus far.  The problem we are running into now is that this formula really isn’t going to work very well if we intend to buy a house, or have kids (which we do).  The person with more income is going to have to use a lot of that ‘more’ if we want a house that isn’t a shack.

Now, it isn’t that being able to afford these things is a problem.  They are do-able, achievable goals.  It’s the concept that all of a sudden it’s going to be pretty uneven financially, when viewed individually.  One of us is going to be paying a lot more, but we’re receiving equal benefits.  And for both of us, it’s the first time in either of our lives where our financial stability will be tied to someone else’s financial stability.  It’s the first time I can’t afford something basic, like housing, without the help of someone else in my adult life.  Our fates will be officially linked.  It’s like there’s less individuality there, somehow.  For two people who have been very independent and individual their entire lives, it’s a terrifying concept.

This makes me suspect that disagreements on this topic, not just with Alex and I, but with most couples, are not just about money.  This is stressful, emotional stuff because something important isn’t under your solitary control anymore.  Or maybe it’s an under-discussed fear about marriage in general, a fear about losing independence, and this is where it manifests.  Whatever the reason, the idea that it is not just MY money anymore is the hardest pill I’ve ever had to swallow.  I’ve worked hard to have a clean financial name, and it bothers the heck out of me that it won’t just be mine anymore.  I’ve never been particularly good at sharing.

I think that maybe this is why so many couples have trouble when it comes to money.  Money is power and control, and you can’t have much of a life without it.  Lucky for me, Alex and I do talk about money and the future a lot.  I suspect we will figure it all out intelligently and be fine.  Many people have trouble talking about this topic, though, so if anyone else is willing to share their thoughts and experiences, please do!

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic as an exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

Today’s Topic:  Does Lying a Good Marriage Make?

Today’s topic was inspired by this article, which Whitney found and sent to me last week.

“Marriage cannot exist without dishonesty.” ????!!!!  Really?!  As a soon-to-be-married person, I was rather taken aback by this statement.  Obviously I don’t have all the answers, since I’m not married yet, but this did not seem like the type of advice one normally listens to.   And so I had to think about what a lie really is, and what it means, before I could decide how I felt about this article.

Here is what I found:

The Dictionary.com definition of “lie”

1. A false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood
2. Something intended or serving to convey a false impression; imposture
3. An inaccurate or false statement
4. The charge or accusation of lying

Then there is the lie of omission, whereby you omit an important fact and deliberately leave another person with a misconception.

This is interesting because my fiancee and I disagree on whether or not lies of omission are truly lies.  He says if you haven’t actually said something that’s untrue, it’s not a lie.  I say if you leave something out that will give a different view or understanding, it is a lie.  You can be the judge, since the definition of lie is directly above this paragraph.  But it’s interesting that a committed couple would argue about lying, and if it’s good or bad in this manner.  Which happens to fall right into what this article is talking about!

I always thought the key to a good marriage – and really any relationship – is open and honest communication.  It seems to me that lying to decidedly not open and honest.  So my initial reaction to this article was to think it was a load of crap.  Don’t tell me the way to make my marriage work will be to tell lies to my husband!  I most certainly do not want him telling lies to me – like saying he likes my meatballs if he really doesn’t.  **Note, I am not accusing Alex of disliking my meatballs, this is merely an example.**  That would mean he is doomed to a life of eating meals he doesn’t want!

(As a side note, this makes me think of a funny story.  In college, one of my roommates (Jessica) and I had another roommate who was not the greatest at cooking.  She had a boyfriend who came over a lot, and he was too polite to tell her he didn’t like her meals.  I remember one time in particular when she had made chicken and biscuits out of a box, and served it to all of us.  It was terrible.  Jessica and I made up a story about needing to go get tampons at the store and left, but really we were going to Taco Bell.  The poor guy had to stay and pretend to like the food, then putz around the kitchen late that night looking for something else to eat because he couldn’t tell her the truth!  I do not want this for Alex.)

So, like I said, initially I thought this article was irritatingly bad advice.  But… then I thought of a piece of advice I’ve been given a lot over the last couple of years: you have to pick your battles.  This is, I believe, key to making a relationship work.  Something the author of this article wrote is quite true – when you spend the amount of time with a person that you spend with your spouse, they are going to get on your nerves.  No one is 100% thrilled about everything about their significant other 100% of the time.  But if you were to point out every little thing honestly, you’d fight all the time, and your partner would be left wondering why you’re with them at all.  Which makes me have to conclude that a part of this article is true. It is important to tell the whole truth to your spouse, but sometimes, when it’s just not that important, it is better to let it go and keep your opinion to yourself.  I don’t think there is a formula to this.  But, I don’t think in any equation you’d find room for lying about big things, like how you want to raise kids or where you spent the night.  As awful as the concept of lying to your spouse seems, the concept of getting divorced over which way the toilet paper should hang seems infinitely more terrible.

If you’d like to read Whitney’s take on this article, you can read it here!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic as an exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

Today’s Topic: Thoughts and Memories on the First Week of Being Engaged

A major milestone was reached for me since I last posted on my blog.  I am now engaged!  Since Whitney and I can now say we both have experienced the first week of betrothal, we decided to make that the topic of this collective blog post.

You know how in school, when you’re writing those God-awful essays for college entrance or scholarship contests, they like to ask you to pick one word to describe yourself or an experience and then explain why you chose that word?  Well, the only word I can think of to sum up the experience of the first week of being an engaged person is this: surreal.   I definitely never thought I would get married (you can ask any of my friends, they will back me up on that), and I definitely never thought I would be getting married to Alex.  He is definitely everything I never knew I always wanted.  And I hate to say this, because I think it probably sounds awful, but I can only remember the proposal in bits and pieces.  I know what we did and what he said before it, and after it, but the actual proposal is a bit hazy.  Alex feels the same way; people ask him what he said and he can’t remember!  It’s like someone else’s life to both of us right now.

On top of the feeling that I’ve been removed from my body, there is the realization that one of my closest friends was dead-on balls accurate about one thing: people who are normally rational human beings can become totally crazy when you announce a wedding.  Demands get made that you didn’t see coming.  Things get blown out of proportion that you never would have thought were a big deal to someone.  And then there are the politics of weddings – the guest list, the budget, the wedding party.  And it’s only the first week!  Then there are the questions that have been asked, more than once, by many people, that I didn’t realize you have to be prepared to answer right away.  For example, many people have asked us if I cried when he proposed, or if he cried when he proposed.  To me this is weird, because I’m not really a crier and neither is Alex.  Were we supposed to cry?  Is there something wrong with us because we didn’t?  Obviously this is not as strange a question as I think it is because many people have asked it, but it sure threw me off!  I’ve also been asked many times, in some cases the day after the proposal, if we’d set a date yet.  This one I understand, and it’s a logical question to ask a newly engaged couple, but still!  The other one that threw me off the first time I got it was whether or not I have decided on colors for the wedding.  Again, now that I’ve gotten the question a bunch of times and thought about the reasons, I understand this question.  But it’s pretty overwhelming at first!  (Actually, everything is overwhelming at first…)

And then we come to the ring.  I love my ring.  It’s beautiful and I am so proud of the way Alex put it together.  I expected people to want to see it.  I expected myself to look at it a lot.  I did NOT expect that I would be as paranoid as I am about having something happen to it.  Some things are obvious, like don’t wear it if you’re cleaning or doing loads of dishes.  Other things I struggled with at first, and am still struggling with, like hand washing, and showering, and sleeping with it on.  I work in a lab, and it never once occurred to me before I was engaged that you have to decide whether or not you want to wear your ring at work, because lab gloves don’t exactly fit over the ring.  I wear mine, and got bigger gloves, for the record.

So my general impression of being engaged, a little over one week in, is that it’s a lot to take in, and I still haven’t fully absorbed it all!

If you want to read Whitney’s take on her first week of being engaged, you can read it here.

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I am so happy someone actually did a study on this! I’ve been saying it for years… they even allude to the concept in the movie Sleepless in Seattle (remember when Rosie O’Donnell’s character says, “You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.” ?!?). It’s proof that Disney princess stories and romantic comedy films screw up our expectations about life and love:

Romantic Comedies Found to Ruin Your Love Life (from BBC News)

Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life, a study by a university in Edinburgh has claimed.
Rom-coms have been blamed by relationship experts at Heriot Watt University for promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love.
They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner.
Many held the view if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them.
Psychologists at the family and personal relationships laboratory at the university studied 40 top box office hits between 1995 and 2005, and identified common themes which they believed were unrealistic. The movies included You’ve Got Mail, Maid In Manhattan, The Wedding Planner and While You Were Sleeping.
The university’s Dr Bjarne Holmes said: “Marriage counsellors often see couples who believe that sex should always be perfect, and if someone is meant to be with you then they will know what you want without you needing to communicate it.
“We now have some emerging evidence that suggests popular media play a role in perpetuating these ideas in people’s minds.
“The problem is that while most of us know that the idea of a perfect relationship is unrealistic, some of us are still more influenced by media portrayals than we realise.”
As part of the project, 100 student volunteers were asked to watch the 2001 romantic comedy Serendipity, while a further 100 watched a David Lynch drama.
Students watching the romantic film were later found to be more likely to believe in fate and destiny. A further study found that fans of romantic comedies had a stronger belief in predestined love.
Kimberly Johnson, who also worked on the study, said: “Films do capture the excitement of new relationships but they also wrongly suggest that trust and committed love exist from the moment people meet, whereas these are qualities that normally take years to develop.”
The researchers have now launched an online study on media and relationships.
They are asking people to participate by answering questions about personality, relationships, and media consumption habits by filling in a questionnaire which you can click on here

© 2008 – 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

It is officially the middle of December. The date has entered double digits, the countdown to the big ball drop on the last day of the month is approaching, and pretty soon all those ‘The Year In Review’ issues of popular magazines will be hitting the stands. It therefore seems an appropriate time to take a step back and look at what life has taught me in the last year. And as I sit here and look back, I notice there is one over-arching lesson that has repeatedly reared its ugly head:

Life… gets complicated.

Come on, you know it’s true. Things that used to look black and white turn shades of grey and ivory the older you get. The consequences of your actions are more readily identifiable. Caution and deliberation replace impulse and rashness.

Which begs the question: where have all the Disney endings gone? Isn’t Alice supposed to wake up? Shouldn’t the shoe fit Cinderella’s foot? Of course Peter Pan is going to beat Captain Hook! Everything is supposed to work out in the end… or is it?

I’ve said it loads of times: you grow up thinking you’re going to go to college, get your dream job, meet the significant other of your dreams, get married, have kids, and live happily ever after. I can’t help but notice as I look around my friends and family that I do not know a single person for whom life has followed this grandmaster scheme. Quite the contrary. Everyone has experienced bumps in the road, detours, missed exits, and/or traffic congestion since entering adulthood. Life gets complicated.

When exactly does this happen, I wonder? At what moment does life take the wide-eyed idealist and pound them into, at best a realist, at worst, a pessimist? When is it that we begin to adjust our expectations to match our reality? I mean, it’s always something… if you don’t have relationship problems, you have money problems. If your relationship and your finances are going along just swimmingly, then you have family drama, or you hate your job. The perfect life does not seem to exist. Life seems to be about being happy with imperfection and letting go of the need to control the environment around you in order to obtain some out-of-reach vision of perfection you cling to from deep in your childhood.

There are people out there who would justifiably take issue with what I just said – that we should learn to be happy with imperfection. They would argue no one should settle for anything less than everything they always wanted. And I think there is something to that. It would be truly tragic if we were to simply talk ourselves into being content with our given lot in life and never try to change anything.

Which is why I think the biggest thing I have come to understand in the last year is this: life is not perfect; it’s terribly complicated the more you learn and experience, but I think life might be about deciding which things are most important to you (love, family, career, friends, robots… whatever…) and making sure you don’t settle for anything less than happiness when it comes to the things that mean the most to you. Example: maybe you don’t have the biggest house or the fanciest pants, but you have the world’s greatest spouse, damnit!

I suspect this is why we are supposed to respect our elders – they already know all of this stuff, and if we’d just listen to them once in a while, perhaps the shock of life wouldn’t be so jarring – and we wouldn’t be left looking bewildered and wondering when it all got so complicated.

© 2008 – 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

While tooling around AOL for background info for my NaNovel, I came across this article. I was surprised because much of this advice is stuff I have heard before from my friends, or given out to my friends. Usually articles like this are dumb, but since this impressed me, I must share:

From AOL.com:
While there are very few guarantees in life and love, one thing’s for sure. Along the road toward happily ever after, there will be plenty of bumps. But that doesn’t necessarily make the journey unpleasant. In fact, some of the lessons you learn in life and love may be hard to swallow, but ultimately make you a stronger, healthier, and happier individual. What follows are four hard-learned love lessons. See which ones you’ve already encountered, as well as the ones you’ve yet to experience.
Lesson #1: Some Relationships are Temporary
When you acknowledge that some relationships are temporary, you learn to stop blaming yourself for what you perceive as relationship failures, and instead see them for what they are – valuable life lessons. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s probably clear that the relationships that ended were with partners who weren’t your perfect match. Maybe your personalities didn’t mesh, your goals and future vision were not aligned, or your priorities conflicted. As painful as these breakups can be, they happen for a reason. Not only that, but if you’re totally honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re much better off as a result of the relationship and breakup than you would have been had you never experienced the love and loss in the first place.

Lesson #2: Learn/Apply Your Lessons Quickly
Just as breakups happen for a reason, the lessons you learn as a result of heartache are valuable as well. For example, you may never have known the importance of being with someone who makes you a priority had you not gone through a relationship where your partner put work, friends, and hobbies before you. Or you may not have realized the importance of healthy family relationships until you dated someone whose family life was incredibly dysfunctional. Not only is it important to identify the lessons you learn along the journey toward happily ever after, but you owe it to yourself to apply the lessons learned, paying attention to red flags as they are revealed to you in the future.

Lesson #3: Your Partner Cannot Fix You or Your Life
Once upon a time, women were raised to believe that Prince Charming would one day swoop in on a white steed and save them from whatever they didn’t like about themselves or their lives. In 2008, this antiquated fairy tale is in need of a major rewrite. In fact, if your perfect partner were to arrive in the middle of your messy and miserable life, chances are he would make a hasty retreat. Which is why it’s essential to take steps to fix whatever it is that you don’t enjoy about your life, starting today. If you don’t like your job, do something about it. If you’re burdened by debt, take steps to remedy the situation, day by day, week by week. Don’t expect some guy to solve your problems or rescue you from your everyday existence. It’s just not going to happen. Instead, it’s up to you to rescue yourself.

Lesson #4: Figure Out What Really Makes You Happy
Since it’s unlikely that your perfect partner will magically appear and save the day, it’s essential that you figure out what makes you happy – today! Once you do, empower yourself to take the necessary steps to change your life accordingly. By creating and embracing a life you love, you’re all the more likely to attract the love of your life. In doing so, you increase your chances of relationship success, because both you and your partner were happy as individuals before coming together as a couple.

© 2008 – 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

© 2008, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I have been thinking a lot today about gut instincts.

I have always been told that instinct, intuition, or whatever other version of the concept of gut reaction you want to use to describe it, is something you are supposed to listen to and trust. And I think that is good advice. Gut reaction is a person is sleazy. Usually turns out they are sleazy. Gut reaction tells you to move away from the clumsily piled bricks above you. Usually turns out the bricks were going to fall and it’s good you weren’t in their way. But how do you handle it when your gut instinct is to run as far away from something that, logically, you should be fine with?

When it comes to relationships, I have been known to fight my gut on a regular basis. Guy seems likely to get more abusive (in my intuition region), but I stay anyway. Guy seems untrustworthy and likely to be cheating, I don’t break up with him. I always seem to know before I know that something will be bad for me. Until now.

My gut is so telling me to not bother meeting Janice’s cousin. He lives too far away. I have too much going on to make a long distance relationship work. He seems far too passive for me to be able to deal with long-term. But everyone around me is telling me to just go, that it will be good. My New Year’s Resolution this year was to stop doing things I don’t want to do and to focus on myself. I think I have done a really good job of that. And I have shunned relationships as part of this. Even if I now believe I am ready for one of those, what does it mean that my gut is telling me, screaming at me really, that I shouldn’t do this set-up thing?

When do you trust your gut, and when do you ignore it? Does the past teach us nothing where this is concerned??

© 2007 – 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.