by Ronnie Tyler | on January 4th, 2013
Black and Married With Kids.com
A Positive Image of Marriage and Family
I have confession to make. I prepared a huge meal for my husband for our third date. And, I pulled out all the stops….making homemade mac and cheese, I fried some chicken ( and you know it’s takes work to fry chicken), and I made some delicious cabbage. And it didn’t stop there….I got my mom to make him some homemade rolls and a cake. Was that shameful…who knows…but I got that ring in 11 months flat…lol!
That was a lot of work. And was it sending the wrong message too soon in our relationship? Well in our case, we had a long distance relationship. So our 3rd date was like 3 months after our 1st date. …..and after we had clocked in thousands of hours talking on the phone and getting to know each other….falling in love. And while I had been to visit him in the DC area, this was his first time in my home in the Tidewater Va area. So, I was making it special.
They say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. But my mama and auntie’s also say, “what you do to catch him is what you will have to do to keep him.” And believe me, I do not cook big ‘soul food’ meals for my family often.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with doing nice things for the person that you are dating from time to time. Lamar really courted me with dates, flowers, gifts…the works. And I was more than happy to do things in return that made him happy…which included cooking him a delicious meal.
Well, this one author says that she is re-thinking cooking for “just any” man that she is dating.
“The most recent man I cooked for was the poet I had a brief but intense relationship with this past spring. He was mildly autistic and one of the more noticeable signs was his relationship with food: he needed to smell everything before he could eat it and was extremely sensitive to texture and taste. It was interesting to be dating someone who did not share my love for food — he ate out of necessity, not enjoyment.
He once expressed a sadness that his issue would make it difficult for me to cook for him, something he knew I loved to do, but I vowed to find a way. One evening, I made a simple marinara sauce, asking him how much garlic, onion, etc. he liked. As I stirred and added more ingredients, I would give him tastes every few minutes and he would advise, based on his highly sensitive palate, what it needed more of. A couple hours and a ton of dried oregano later, the sauce was to his liking. The funny thing was that his sensitivity to taste meant that he would only eat a tiny bit of sauce with each bite of pasta — he would literally dip his fork in sauce before twirling it in bare spaghetti noodles and would be able to taste that sheer coating of flavor throughout the entire bite. But watching him eat, my heart literally almost exploded from my chest. I hadn’t said I love you, but I was communicating it loud and clear with each bite of food he took.
Two months later, we broke up. (You can read about that further detail in this essay.) I was heartbroken, but it was the final lesson in a series of similar experiences. I finally realized that I needed to change my approach with men, that I needed to move slower, to not be so quick to trust, to not force intimacy to move faster than it should. Because cooking for me is an intimate act, an expression of affection, that means I won’t be cooking for a man until I feel confident that our depth of feeling for the other is mutual. That we have the ingredients to be something truly worth the wait. Until then, I’m happy to cook for one.”
Please check out the entire article titled: Girl Talk: I Won’t Cook For Just Any Man Ever Again
BMWK – Do you also feel that cooking for a man or woman is an intimate act? When would you or did you start cooking for the person you were dating? Did anybody start doing things when they were dating …that they just could not keep up with in marriage?
About the author
Ronnie Tyler is the co-creator of BlackandMarriedWithKids.com and co-producer of the films Happily Ever After: A Positive Image of Black Marriage, You Saved Me, Men Ain’t Boys and Still Standing. The proud mom of 4 has been selected by Parenting Magazine as a Must-Read Mom and is one of Babble’s Top 100 Mom Bloggers.
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Tuesday, January 8th 2013 at 12:18AM
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