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.

When I sat down at the computer to write this blog, I had intended to write about my recent trip to Aruba with Alex.  It was a great trip, very relaxing, and filled with loads of entertaining anecdotes I intended to share with my blog readers.  For example, I wanted to expound upon the wonder that is Aruban beef cuisine.  The trouble is, when I sat down to look in my trusty blog moleskine to see what I wanted to say about the trip, all I could focus on was the little note I made about a movie I watched three times the week we went away: He’s Just Not That Into You.

I suppose I ought to explain why I watched it three times in a week.  I borrowed the DVD from my dad and watched it on my own one night with a glass of wine.  But I thought there were some pieces that were so very true that I made Alex watch it with me the next night.  And then JetBlue had the same movie as the feature on our flight from Aruba to NYC.  Oops.  That’s what always happens, isn’t it?

The trouble is, by the time I got to my third viewing, I was pissed off at the movie.  I felt it was rather disappointing in its message.

In case you haven’t seen the movie, I advise you to not read any further because what I am about to say will be a spoiler for you.

He’s Just Not That Into You is a movie based on a book written by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo by the same title.  I’ve read the book.  I think I still own a copy of it.  The whole point of the book is to explain why women should get over guys that don’t show interest, because it’s OK that not every guy is interested.  It also gives hints to identify this behavior in men you might be currently involved with.  The movie picks up this theme, and weaves together a bunch of storylines that all involve some variation of “he/she’s not that into you.”  One of the male characters has a sort-of mantra: you’re the rule, not the exception.  Just because girls tell each other stories about a friend of a friend of a cousin who had some guy be a total jerk but then wound up getting married to the jerk and being happy doesn’t mean life will go that way for you, because that’s the exception, not the rule, he says.

I think this is fantastic for women to hear.  I know I spent way more time than I ever should have making excuses or reassuring myself with some story about someone else’s life that gave me hope for my loser of a boyfriend.  Most women fall into that trap.  I think that’s why the book was so successful when it was published – successful enough that a self-help book was turned into a major motion picture with actors like Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, and Jennifer Connolly to boot.  I also have pretty strong opinions about Hollywood conditioning women to expect “the fairy tale” when it comes to love, and how that can actually sabotage real-life relationships, so I had high hopes for this movie.  (See blogs here and here if you are curious about my opinions on fairy-tale love expectations.)

So you can imagine my disappointment when He’s Just Not That Into You turned out to be merely another example of a cheesy Hollywood ending, where the main characters turn out to be the exception, not the rule, and everyone is happy in the end.  WTF?!  Even the male character (name happens to be Alex) who insists most people are the rule ends up making an exception!  It’s the worst cliche ending!  This movie is not appropriate for Anti-Valentine’s Day parties at all – which is exactly what it was marketed as, because it was released just in time for Valentine’s Day 2009.

To be fair, I did watch the movie 3 times, so obviously there must have been something about it that at least entertained me.  And there was.  The truth behind some of the characters’ frustrations was incredibly funny to watch and relate to.  Social media networks for finding romance, the silly things girls do when a guy hasn’t called them yet, and guys do when they are playing “the game” … all these things make the movie fun to watch once.

I’m just not sold on it being a movie for people who are single and looking for an escape from the typical romantic comedy.

© 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.