Dear Richard
My girlfriend has giving up eating meat for January, and has embraced her new diet with a martyr’s zeal. She now refuses to cook meat, and insists we have no fish, meat, eggs or dairy in the fridge.
I’m working my way through the few frozen steaks and chilli con carnes in the freezer. But she is insisting that I eat these alone, then scrub the kitchen surfaces down – and sleep in the single bed afterwards. Once those run out, it’ll be beetroot and tofu all the way.
I’m not sure I can live like this. How can we find a middle ground? Is it crazy to admit that sometimes I’ve been left so bereft I have to order a Deliveroo and lurk outside in the garden, eating on my own?
– Roy, Huntingdonshire
Dear Roy
Well, you’re in an impossible position, aren’t you? I know lots of vegetarians and vegans, including in my own family, and none of them would dream of imposing their views on anyone else. Your girlfriend is behaving completely unreasonably. She can choose to eat or not eat what she likes: you have exactly the same rights. Well, short of cannibalism.
Why do you have to sleep in a separate bed if you have meat for dinner, or drink a glass of milk, or enjoy a boiled egg? If she feels that strongly about it, why doesn’t she sleep in the single bed? Why are you the banished one? And why the forensic cleaning of the kitchen after your dinner, but not hers?
It’s bonkers, Roy, and, I’m sorry to say, that it is domestic dictatorship, pure and simple. Dictators must never be appeased: they only throw their weight around even more. That’s what is happening here.
All I can say is that I wouldn’t tolerate such nonsense for a second and if that meant the relationship foundering on the soggy sands of tofu, so be it. If my girlfriend were treating me like a pariah, I’d be actively considering an imminent exodus.
Your girlfriend has every right to walk the dietary path of her choosing. So do you. I fear things have got past compromise, and that you stand at a crossroads. I know which way I’d turn.
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