Recently I read a medium article all about a woman who got annoyed with her boyfriend when they went grocery shopping. She blamed it on her own impatience, but to me it seemed like she was really annoyed because her partner got all soft and floaty in the grocery store. The problem they had was how to buy food while also being in the flow of romantic love.
While it isn’t always easy, here’s how my partner and I create art out of buying kale.
Whimsy Dinner
Right after we started dating my partner said to me, “Every time I go to the grocery store there’s always stuff I want to buy, like cool vegetables, or random noodles. But I always stop myself because I can’t figure out what I would do with them”
We had been having one of those early relationship conversations where you talk about how you do ordinary things, grocery shopping, buying clothes online, or washing the dishes.
“Well what if we went to the store and you just picked out what you wanted and I’d figure out how to make a meal out of it?”
She smiled at me. “You would do that?”
I smiled back.
The feminine at the grocery store.
My partner’s desire was 100% natural. Since she likes to live in the feminine she likes to follow the flow of her inspiration. She can totally plan and execute her own meals but this was something different, she wanted to be able to listen to her inner guidance and choose food based upon that.
The masculine at the grocery store.
When I’m in my masculine I love a challenge. Give me a complex set of things to organize or a difficult conversation to have and I light up. The idea of getting a set of random ingredients I needed to contain into an edible meal inspired me. I also loved that I would get to watch her choose random items and follow her joy.
The first time we went shopping it was magical. She went from aisle to aisle picking out random food. I didn’t even know what fennel looked like before she put it in the cart and I really wasn’t sure how I was going to work pomegranate into the meal either, but I just let her wander as I followed her with my phone out looking for recipe ideas.
That night we had arugula, fennel, pomegranate salad to start, garlic rosemary chicken, with roasted golden beets finished with beet greens and honey goat cheese for the main course and assorted mochi for dessert.
And we’ve done this almost every week since then.
The reason it works is that we aren’t attached to the outcome. When we do these whimsy dinners, we make an effort to go with the flow and be with each other. We work to embody the whimsy in our relationship. It’s not always easy in the day-to-day, but having specific nights and times set aside to do this works really well for us.