What my pots and pans teach me about my spouse

I recently got married (cue celebratory wedding bells!)

On a sunny spring day in April of 2020, standing on the side of a creek with hands sweating and shaking with nerves, my best friend got down on one knee and asked me to take this wild adventure called life with him. With the fear of covid in the air, we cautiously visited family to wave a newly-ringed finger through closed windows and commenced with planning the start of our new lives together right away. After cutting the typical wedding guest list by over 90% and switching venues a month before the big day we were those crazy kids who did indeed tie the knot by the end of 2020, allowing us to turn the page into a fresh start together as husband and wife in 2021.

Pete and I are two independent adults in our 30s, well into careers, passions, and set in our own ways of doing the dishes, folding bath towels, and cleaning drains. We did not share a home prior to marriage and have both been solidly in the work from home life since last year when the pandemic took hold. Needless to say, discovering how we organize our two lives into one can be a challenge. But along the way, we've been discovering that this doesn't need to be a journey of drudgery, locked in a tense battle of butting heads over how we make a house a home.

Instead, the seemingly mundane, everyday work of organization has the potential to be another exercise in discovering more about this partner I've chosen. It's fertile ground for curiosity because the ways that we choose to organize often can often speak loudly about our experiences, upbringing, and culture.

Example: For our wedding shower, we received a beautiful set of new pots and pans. Seriously, it's a little uncomfortable how much I love our pots and pans. I want to be using them at all times. When I'm not using them, I want to be shining them and putting them on display for all of our four quarantined-eyes to behold. Pete loves our pans too, but perhaps has a funny way of showing it. Comfortable with leaving some spots and stains, he returns them to the shelf for them to taunt me mercilessly with their lack of pristine glow.

All of this could have led to petty banter that goes nowhere. Instead, it offered a space for conversation around our values. Because Pete, you see, uses pots and pans for their intended purpose-cooking. If they can function, then who cares what they look like? It related a lot to how his family used items growing up. I had absorbed a different view---from not having particularly nice things in my childhood, I was set on wanting these items to speak of how proud I was to be able to be the caretaker of such glorious pots and pans. We've needed to bring these two approaches together in how we create our home. There are spaces in the home that are strictly for function, like the tool table in the basement with everything laid out in a simple pattern to quickly find for repairing leaky pipes and broken items. Other places, like the kitchen, are where we can channel more creativity. We have a relatively small eat-in kitchen, leading to a lot of wall storage all happily decorated to show off those pots and pans that I'm clearly obsessed with.

For you and your roommate or spouse, it might be another home item that leads you to question another person's motives or actions. I urge you to use this as a learning experience to draw into deeper relationship.

But even more profound than my discovery about what the pots and pans look like and why they look the way they do, is how we use them. How does the way we organize our food and eating patterns speak to our experiences as people and help us to build our life together?

Because friends, you gotta eat. Food is one of the few things you'll carry into an intimate relationship with another person. Something that becomes a regular rhythm that we build much of the rest of our lives around. Don't fall into the trap of being the couple who orders pizza weekly because it's too much work to make a plan on this one together.

Pete and I are still learning and we absolutely have those weeks where we end up in fast food drive-thrus because life got busy. But we've tried to use food organization as a way to also learn from each other, share our strengths, and unleash creative outlets. Pete spent several years in his 20s working as a support-based employee with a sports ministry organization. During that time, he was severely underpaid and learned to view food entirely through the lens of survival. His budget needed to stretch to make it through each month, leading to a lot of creativity in how to make a new dish out of a few staple ingredients, but less exploration into new spices, seasonings, and types of foods. I had grown up going through cycles of unhealthy eating patterns, from a childhood fueled by Happy Meals to a later struggle with an eating disorder. Adulthood for me became about seeking to redeem unhealthy patterns. We are both bringing our own experiences with food into our marriage.

So, we bring our strengths to the table. Pete has taught me a lot about budgeting and creating meals out of what we already have. I have been able to teach him about the many recipes that exist through the beauty of the Internet and together, we've fallen into healthier rhythms for how we both view and use food. Together, we have built a rock solid schedule of Sunday afternoon grocery trips, a colorful fridge menu of meals, and a goal of consciously cooking at least one of our meals together each week, so that we can observe how each of us approaches reading a recipe, preparing ingredients, and getting the final product eventually to the table.

As we get closer to spring and summer, with garden projects to start, a room to finish, and other possibilities on the horizon, I look forward to seeing my husband and I become even less of strangers to each other through the mundane organization of life.