In a relationship with a man who can’t cook AT ALL

[Packse]

I am really enjoying a year long relationship. We get on great, he’s attractive, kind and relatively successful. But he cannot cook in the slightest. It’s actually such a turn off. We are both 30 yo.

For dinner he will make ramen or pasta with ketchup 🤢. Not even a jar of tomato sauce with a grating of Parmesan. He boils eggs as he can’t even scramble them. We’ve been talking about kids/marriage. And tbh I would be hugely resentful if I had to cook every meal. I am a very competent cook and it’s definitely a love language of mine. Sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine whilst someone cooks you a delicious meal is my idea of heaven

He’s pretty great in every other way. But I don’t want to teach anyone basic life skills. And I don’t see him taking the initiative.

Is it a no go? Or just a compromise I have to make.

wouldn't be a deal breaker to me, but obviously it's more important to you

before moving in, you need to seriously discuss splitting up the chores and responsibilities, ask him directly how he sees the cooking situation. If it's all on you, make it clear this is a no go and he has to step up, even if it's small steps at first, like something better than ketchup with pasta.

If you can read then you can cook.

He just can't be bothered.

I have a sister that can’t cook. She still manages to put together simple, nutritious meals for her children. She has learned to make a few simple things that require actual cooking, but she sticks to quick basics. She is perfectly happy eating that way.

I don’t think we should try to change people to make them fit us. You need to accept this or move on.

if you have children, he will surely be able to make them a sandwich. He will figure out how to cook them pasta with jarred sauce and he can buy pre-cut fruit and vegetables at the store if he wants. Those can be delicious, especially with a dip, which again, doesn’t have to be homemade it can just be some store bought salad dressing. He can figure out how to make a quesadilla. Basically, he can parent and feed your children perfectly well without having cooking skills that extend much past his current abilities.

Just teach him. If you don’t want to, then more fool you. I bet someone else would love to marry him, so set him free if he doesn’t meet your standards.

Does he not have parents? Why was he not taught to cook?
He won't start now, you're on a hiding to nothing. You'll be doing it all if you live together.
Wbat if you have kids and are incapacitated? Who would feed them?
Does he do any housework, or would you be doing all that too?
I would not be moving in with such a person!

Personally I'd be happy to cook every meal in return for the other person doing all of the dishes.

But if you plan on having kids, presumably there are occasions where he'd have to be the one to cook (if you're out, or if you work late for whatever reason, etc). You'd have to be happy to cook something ahead of time, or for him to serve a crap meal to your kids.

If it were me I'd jump on the opportunity to negotiate - I do all the groceries and cooking, he does all of the cleaning. My idea of heaven.

But at the end of the day you have to decide if this is a dealbreaker for you or not.

Pasta and ketchup is grim. How do people get food like thar past their lips, or am I missing something? Is it secretly delicious?

Been together over 20 years and have kids . If he couldn't cook i would now be so resentful for being responsible for the thousands of meals I would have had to cook for all of us .
It's definitely something that would wind me up . we just naturally take turns. we both have set meals we are better at doing and love .
The simple recipe boxes sound like a good idea. They do make it all so easy to follow. Maybe he will get a real taste for it once he starts

⬆️ this is your future, OP.

Ask him how he feels about you cooking for yourself from now on and never him. See his reaction and then dump him.

Yes this. He wants you to do it for him.

Imagine you are too unwell to even move. He comes to you and says, "can I get you something to eat. How about a yogurt?". How would you fancy that if you became bedridden? Living on yogurt? Not even a piece of toast that isn't burnt, white, dry, soggy or cold.

Can't cook, won't cook. It's rare for them to change.

How can you even stand to let somebody come at you with tomato sauce pasta on their breath. There aren't enough 🤮s in the entire world to describe my feelings on that one.

What are all these people who don't/can't cook doing, whole their partner is preparing a meal? Sitting in front of the TV?

Learning to cook isn't about formally being taught what to do. It's about mucking in and helping. If a meal needs preparing, then why is it not a shared task, at least some of the time? Just playing a part in the meal prep is how we all learned surely?

As I said in an earlier post, cooking together and chatting as you go is a positive thing for a relationship. So if you're the non-cooking half of a relationship, get off the sofa and lend a hand. And if you're the cooking half, call your partner in to give you a hand.

I'll repeat my advice to OP. If your planning to live together, you need to set out your stall. "If we're going to live together, I'm not going to be your full time chef. You're going to cook with me at least some of the time, and I need to know that you can step up in the kitchen too"

There's also no excuse for women who don't know how to put oil in the car or hammer a picture hook in the wall etc. Life can end up with us being alone, so everyone should have some basic skills in all areas of running a home and a car, and feeding one's self (and possibly kids) nutritiously..

He has to want to. So he has to realise it’s important. When I met my now dh, he was newly divorced and could hear stuff up. So he could get a meal on the table …but it was quite beige or, sometimes, odd. He loves food and had 3 kids to feed.

he can now cook, we had lamb chops, quinoa with herbs and roasted veg last night. I’m a good cook, but I refused to cook all the time, ….he had to learn and did. I still do most of the thinking about food….but it’s all fairly evenly shared the rest o& it. He also does most of the clearing up.

Teach him! I taught my DH though he only does fairly basic things.

Nowadays 'cooking' isn't necessarily required - it's more about heating it for the right length of time. I'm sure many people have no idea how to cook really. My mum was a great cook but my dad's now widowed and he uses the just heat up method.

I can cook but generally choose not to as I find it incredibly boring. DH is the same. We don’t have children though so basically just fend for ourselves.

I eat lots of toast, yoghurt with fruit, frozen veggies, soup, sandwiches ramen, maybe pasta, frozen jacket potatoes, beans on toast etc.

I do like food and will eat all sorts in restaurants but I’m just not remotely interested in cooking.

Tell him he needs to learn or you're off! He's taking the piss. If he's an intelligent adult then he's perfectly capable of mastering a few basics. He's acting like a man-child. That would give me the ick.

He has to want to.

No he doesn't. He has to recognise that if you live together you help each other and share responsibilities. The alternative is that he thinks he can just sit on the sofa while OP does all the work involved in the meal every day.

I agree with this.

I think that you are a particularly good cook and you think it is easy.

I really struggle cooking and can't do scrambled eggs or saute veg either.

I don't eat upfs but I eat basic food like boiled eggs and steamed veg.

I don't like cooking like you do.

I do think it's partly about nurture. My parents and grandparents were interested in food and my father and grandfather were from different European cultures and wanted to recreate meals from their childhoods.

Despite having men in the family who could cook, women in the 60s were expected to be the main cooks. Aged 19 I did a cordon bleu Cookery course.

MIL was never interested and never learnt . To her it was a boring chore and food was provided as cheaply as possible. No love of food was nurtured in her children oddly they are all rather greedy

Then you have to tell him, learn to cook or you won't move in, because you don't want to cook every meal for the rest of your life not including takeaway or meals out of course but every meal at home. He's a won't cook , I mean , won't even try to scramble eggs ffs!

What if they don’t have children? He'll expect her to cook for him in perpetuity.

It’s a lie. If you can read you can cook.

As the non cooking half, this is spot on. There's always sous chef stuff to do in the kitchen to help the main chef. Grate some cheese, peel some potatoes, weigh ingredients out, wash up as you go along. Put some tunes on, have a glass of wine, have a chat. Lovely few hours there. And that's how non-cooks will actually learn their way round a kitchen. The block for non-cooks is the "intuitive" stuff - what happens when a recipe goes wrong, how to adjust for your kitchen or your taste, what a "pinch" or "glug" even mean - and you only learn those things by watching.

You also learn what your actual strengths and weaknesses are rather than the entirety of "cooking" being a weakness. My biggest weakness is anything involving dexterity, including the dreaded "finely chopping". I cannot - physically cannot - finely chop anything. I also second-guess myself whenever a recipe is overly vague about seasoning or spice, and end up going too far or not far enough. But it turns out I'm fairly competent at anything that has precise instructions and just requires a lot of weighing and measuring, so I can make a decently tasty (albeit very rustic-looking) cake.

I'm never going to be the cooking half and DP still cooks 90% of the time, because ultimately it relaxes him and it stresses me out. When he's away I default to random grazing. But that is the way to thread the needle between the cook and the non-cook.

(Unlike a lot of non-cooks, I think one reason I never taught myself is because I like food too much. My sad early attempts at cooking for myself fell so far beneath my standards and the effort/reward ratio wasn't even close to justifying it. So I stopped trying.)

I I used to be in a relationship with someone who had no clue how to cook rice. Now, a normal person who doesn’t know how to cook rice would just grab the bagged kind, right? But no…. He’d boil 5 liters of water for a tiny bit of rice, let it cook for however long he felt like, then dump it all into a sieve and drain it like pasta. I had no idea about this rice madness until we moved in together. We’d been dating for a while, and somehow, this never came up.

So one day, I see it happening in real time, him confidently straining his sad, waterlogged rice, and I'm like “You know you’re supposed to use the 2:1 water to rice ratio, right?”
He was deeply offended. Like, full-on wounded pride levels of offended. As if I had questioned his entire existence. But sir… you were out here boiling rice like spaghetti🥲🤣🤣🤣🤣

He's shown you that he's capable of taking care of things for himself in the way that he wants and does not care that it's not working for you. Do not enmesh your life any more with this loser as this will be the way everything goes throughout your life.

Also, pasta w/ketchup is a crime against humanity.