Why “What Do You Want For Dinner?” Is A Toxic Question
Ladies, it’s time to turn the tables around on you.
Alright, I get that the title might be a bit harsh, but I have the best intentions here, I promise.
You might have had toxic relationships. You might have experienced gaslighting, manipulating, and cheating, in the past. You’ve had lows in your marriage. Or you’re in a great relationship now but there are just some things that linger in the back of your mind that you can’t or won’t accept.
I never stopped to consider that I could be to blame for some of the things that weren’t right in a past relationship. Even less now in my current marriage. But the saying “it takes two” really does ring true.
How many times have you brought your feelings to your partner and it’s backfired? How much do you let get on your nerves and no matter what you say, he refuses to change, or makes you feel unheard?
Well, here’s what I’ve learned by being with a very logical and unemotional man for the last decade.
Background Context: Expectations Are Personal
They’re standards we set for ourselves as to what we deem to be ethical, considerate, or kind — or wrong, selfish, and nasty.
In all aspects of life, you hold these principles that you come to simply know as facts. For example, when you pay for a service and it fails to deliver, your expectations are not met and thus you might complain or leave a negative review that begins with “I don’t usually write reviews but…”
Another example is that you come to expect respect from everyone around you and when someone says something you deem as rude you might get offended and call them out.
There are standards that the majority of people hold, and thus, can be interpreted as rules that people are expected to uphold. A lot of the time, these rules are actually set in stone in contracts and therefore we apply them everywhere else in life.
I’m not saying this is wrong. But I am saying that just because a majority agrees on a certain standard, it doesn’t mean that it is right, or that there isn’t a flip-side to this.
Hence when you find someone who disagrees with a standard or whose principle on a particular matter is non-existent, it can throw you off.
People turn into righteous individuals and give themselves a sense of superiority when this happens. Then, the expectation for the other party to change or apologize arises.
For example, if you’re being harassed at work and you go to HR or your boss, the culprit will likely get into trouble. Because we as a majority don’t condone harassment.
However, some people might not deem that behavior as offensive and do nothing.
So, who’s right?
When we’re offended, we expect a correction in behavior by the culprit, but do we put anything in place to stop ourselves from becoming offended or affected by their actions or words?
The same can be said in relationships. When you don’t like something your partner does or doesn’t do repeatedly, why should they change, and not your view of it?
Obviously, I’m not referring to examples of domestic abuse or extreme bullying. I’m talking about the less immediately dangerous reasons for resentment to build up in a relationship.
Sometimes, Your Feelings Are To Blame
Expectations are a bitch.
The one thing my husband has said to me time and time again about him and everything else in life — drop the damn expectations. From everyone, and everything in this world. Nobody cares about you as much as you ever will, so stop expecting them to.
He proved that when a decade into our relationship he still won’t remember to put the toilet seat down for me. *Sigh*
Life proved that when I felt let down once again by a so-called friend when she didn’t reciprocate the kind of friendship I wanted to keep (i.e. a deep, meaningful connection involving personal conversations and not just gossip).
When you expect something from someone, you’re essentially putting the responsibility on them to feel good. This breeds resentment and conflict in yourself and in relationships when those expectations are unmet.
When you feel disappointed or hurt when your partner doesn’t do what you want them to, you’re depending on them for your happiness.
And how is that right?
The Annoying Dinner Question
I read an article recently comforting the woman who just wants to be heard. I really resonated with this, because I myself have felt invalidated when someone has said to me “your feelings are wrong”. The example that the writer for this article gives is when he would get angry every time his wife asked him what he’d like for dinner the next day. He just didn’t see the importance of thinking about it when he had so much else going on in his mind.
I have been offended when I have asked my husband and he’s nonchalantly replied “whatever you want”, or he’s asked, “what are the options?”
But then I think about our thinking patterns. I am a stay-at-home mom. I am the one in charge of the house. My husband is in charge of everything financially and he works a full-time job with more hours than is expected of him. When I ask him what he wants for dinner, it’s usually at a time when he’s still very much focusing on his work, or finishing up and looking forward to simply leaving the office and taking a break. He’s not ready to then make decisions that I would normally make.
You’re passing on responsibility at a moment’s notice.
When I ask him that particular question, I am delegating the decision-making to him. It’s like if he turned around to me and expected me to make a work-related decision out of the blue.
OK, that’s a little exaggerated, but you get my point. The question “what do you want for dinner?” symbolizes the weight of the expectation we have suddenly put on our partners when they might not have been ready to take on that responsibility.
The dinner question might indicate a deeper issue to do with the dynamics in your relationship.
It’s a more serious conversation to be had at another time.
The dinner solution.
This was how me and my husband handled it:
He asked me why I wanted his input. I explained how tiring it is to have to think about the mundane, and how jealous I am that his kind of thinking is more stimulating a lot more of the time. That makes for a wider discussion.
But, with the focus on fixing the dinner question, we made a list of meals on a shared document that we both know how to cook, and then added in the table the prep and cooking times, as well as a difficulty level.
That way, if I don’t know what to make one day, I ask him to check the list and pick one with a difficulty level and time consumption of my choice. Job done — on a practical level at least.
It might be that in the future, I want to stop taking care of some meals altogether. But it wouldn’t be fair of me to expect him to take care of them as and when I’m asking. It’s another conversation to be had at another time, too.
We might agree on having a takeaway night once a week. My husband might tell me I can’t rely on him to take care of the meals because he’s working such long and unpredictable hours.
Or I might decide to batch cook and freeze more meals to make things easier on me.
My point is, the dinner question need not lead to arguments because there are many solutions to it.
The root cause.
As for the deeper issue — mundane vs stimulating — that’s my issue. That’s got nothing to do with my husband. I chose to be a stay-at-home parent. I am in control of what I think about and thus, I can choose to not be put out.
Enter writing — I stimulate my brain by challenging myself to read, learn, and write about things that matter to me.
This particular article aims to digest the fact that, sometimes, we should take the time to become more aware as to why we are unhappy with a current situation, and then take adequate action to change it.
Putting responsibility on our partner to fix the surface problem, i.e. the dinner question, in this case, won’t solve the actual problem. We’ll just get annoyed at something else that represents our inner discomfort.
Empowering Ourselves Is Better
By asking the dinner question, we inadvertently make our partners responsible for fixing an issue they themselves may not be aware of. Thus when the expectation isn’t met, we get angry. This is unfair to everyone involved.
Taking control of our problems and solving them on our own is something we are told time and time again to do, but in practice, is done a lot less than you’d think. That’s why there is such a misconception around validating issues, and it being OK not to be OK.
We’re, in practice, instead of working on ourselves, relying on others to feel better.
And to a certain extent, it’s good to hold expectations of your partner so long as they have agreed to uphold them. My husband knows I expect him to take care of our son for an hour or so every morning before he goes to work so that I can work. But this is something we both agreed on after talking about my needs and wants. And when he can’t meet those needs, we look for alternative solutions.
He refuses to clean, for example. So, we have a cleaner to handle the bulk of the housework while I take care of the day-to-day, which as many of you know, is still a lot when there are children involved. So, I turned cleaning into a life hack, and now, because I don’t expect my husband to get involved with it, he has a choice to help or not, with no judgment on my part.
Guess what? He does more than he’s ever done before.
Takeaway
Holding expectations of others breeds resentment and suffering because it puts our responsibility to be happy on them. We are essentially giving up control of our own well-being.
Asking the dinner question is nothing more than a symbol of this.
When you stop holding others accountable for your thoughts and feelings and start to take control of them, you unlock the power within you to make yourself happy regardless of the world around you.
You can’t expect your partner to lift you up time and time again — they’re trying to keep themselves happy too. It is up to you to do the hard work for yourself.
Sylvia Emokpae is passionate about self-love, relationships, and motherhood. See more work like this.
