It hit me today that my partner and I fall back on ordering takeout due to disagreements about divisions of household labor, and it's becoming a pricey problem.
I'm the one who always cooks, but we have very different food palates. She prefers food that is fried, processed, and light on vegetables. I love colorful, Mediterranean-inspired and healthy dishes. She's also very picky and will reject foods if I got the textures and shapes wrong. On top of that, I'm the one who almost always does dishes because she has ADD and will often forget to run the dishwasher, leaving me to do it the next day while the next day's dishes pile up.
We've lived together a year now and there is a small list of recipes we'll both eat. Everything feels like a compromise though and I never feel like I love the foods that I cook anymore. I don't remember the last time I got a home-cooked meal with mushrooms, tofu, fish, or containing more than one vegetable other than peppers and onions. So we go out to eat way more than we used to, and it's a problem.
I used to love cooking for myself, but now it's just a daily source of stress. It's really a downer to work hard on a meal someone ultimately doesn't enjoy, and I worry about our health.