Cooking: a foreplay

If you and your partner love food, then cooking together should be your foreplay.

We already know that cooking is a vulnerable act, one of creation. You’re opening yourself up to making mistakes and facing judgments. You’re also presenting your knowledge and skills to yourself and whomever you’re feeding. All of this takes vulnerability. Open yourself up like you open food packaging when you're hungry. You're going to enjoy it and have fun with it. I promise.

But why cook together? Why not just go out to dinner?

After all our first and second dates tend to be at restaurants; there is an assumption that eating food leads to intimacy. Now consider cooking the food yourselves. How much wholesome (or sexier) is that?

Picture this: You and your partner working hard on a meal. Sharing smalls tasks. Activating your senses. Then sitting down around a candle, in the comfort of your own home. Staring at each other and catching up on each other's day. The moments of sharing your own creation, with a mixture of your own freedom, all coming together with the one you love.

There is nothing more intimate than sharing a meal with your lover, except making that meal with them before sharing it. Quality time with your partner is necessary for a great relationship. What better way to connect than creating a meal you both can enjoy. All the while, you’re having a grand time succeeding, or failing, together. And even though we look forward to the final product, we musn’t forget that the journey there is just as important. It’s where we learn and grow. It’s where we can be ourselves. 

We can get deep here and say that feeding someone has a deep psychological effect on them because they’re being taken care of. You can go as far back as when you were a child and you were dependent on your parents when it came to eating. My point is, making food and feeding someone runs DEEP. Food gives us life. Food fuels us. So when you give someone life, or vice-versa, you appreciate that person. You thank them. You acknowledge them.

Growing up in the kitchen, I was always told that I should learn how to cook because women find that attractive. That always stuck with me. Kind of a side note, but with all these dating apps I cannot begin to explain how many profiles I’ve seen that included something about loving food or cooking food. I saw at least 9 out of 10 this morning that included something about cooking food for someone. So you be the judge of that. Just don’t get stuck in the Metaverse cooking with your partner. That doesn’t count.

My point here is that we all appreciate someone who can cook for us and feed us. No one says “I look for someone who can’t cook for me.” No - no one says that. Everyone wants someone who can cook for them and take care of them.

Remember it’s not about you being good or bad at it, it’s about you doing it and spending time with your lover. 

I’d like to end this by adding to the late Anthony Bourdain’s quote: “You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together”, but you learn a lot more if you make that meal together.