Can I have my cake and eat it too?
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Dear Hera,
I started seeing a man who doesn’t eat sugar. I can’t really shake the idea that this makes us incompatible. I am a big hedonist. I chainsmoke and eat candy for breakfast, and he is over here adding cinnamon to his black coffee cos he says it makes it “sweet”!! I feel like he is rejecting pleasure at a level that feels indicative of his character as a whole. He treats me really well and is awesome, other than this one thing, but I just can’t get over it. Is it a worthy dealbreaker?
Sweet Tooth
Dear Sweet Tooth,
On the surface, breaking up over someone for putting cinnamon in their coffee sounds like an insane thing to do. But honestly, I kind of understand where you’re coming from. Unless you’re a Michelin-star chef, food is one of those things which gets forgotten on the compatibility checklist. When measured against more ideological or aesthetic values, like taste in music or books or politics, being picky about what someone has for dinner seems profoundly unromantic.
But you have to eat. Several times a day. Multiply that by the remaining decades of your life, and it starts to feel like a big deal. In the first flush of new love, someone’s hatred of alliums or severe gluten intolerance or principled stance against sugar/dairy/processed foods might seem endearing or insignificant, but after 20 years of shared meals, you might find yourself wishing you had married someone with a more compatible palette.
Some people really don’t care about food. If it were up to them, they would simply strap on a nosebag and consume their daily nutritional requirement in the form of pellets, to avoid the psychic burden of deciding what to have for dinner each night. Other people don’t have a sweet tooth and would prefer a birthday cake made of seven layers of expensive Dutch cheese. And some people get pleasure in denying themselves pleasure, which in itself is a kind of pleasure. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things, as long as your boyfriend doesn’t stop you from eating your daily serving of breakfast trifle, if that’s what makes you happy.
The trouble comes when you and your partner have profoundly different dietary preferences, especially if those differences are ideological in nature, and you can feel them silently (or not so silently) judging you, every time you eat a doughnut.
For the record, I’m not against having ideological food preferences or culinary dislikes. I have some of my own. It’s just a pain in the ass when they’re not compatible with the person you’re dating. If you’re going to share the cooking duties, it’s a lot easier if you have similar taste. Dinner should be a pleasure, not an ideological battleground.
However, a partner who doesn’t eat sugar is probably easier to handle than, say, someone with a hatred of vegetables or an inability to metabolise nightshades, because you can always buy your own candy and smokes. As long as they don’t insist on leaving the restaurant before you have a chance to order your tiramisu.
What it really comes down to is how judgmental your boyfriend is.
If I were you, I’d be trying to understand first of all where his asceticism is coming from. It’s a principled stand against Big Sugar, a personal health decision, a commitment to being skinny, or does he just not like the taste?
If it’s anything other than a personal preference, the next step would be to try to figure out whether he’s going to be unbearably sanctimonious about it, or whether he’s content to live and let live. Of course, you can’t always tell what someone is like in the beginning, as people tend to get more bossy when they get more comfortable. But you probably have an inkling about the sort of person he is. Is he judgmental or easy-going? Does he insist on being right about everything? Can he relax his standards on special occasions? If it’s your birthday, would he order you a cake the size of your head, or are you getting a celebratory pack of all-natural date and carob bliss balls? If you have children together, will they be sentenced to a lifetime of raisins and dried apricot slices?
If you’re worried, I would suggest having a conversation about it, so you know exactly what you’re in for. If you’re staring down the barrel of a cakeless existence, I would call it quits. But if he’s perfectly content to continue his asceticism on his own time, and allow you to be a hedonistic degenerate in peace, I’d let him off the hook.
Everyone has some vices. Even having no vices can be a vice, in the wrong hands. But there’s no harm in having a conversation, to see if this represents a harmless personal quirk, or a more sobering pursuit of communal gut health.
Life is too short to live cakelessly, even for the love of an otherwise decent man.
