Spouse Abuse: Insight into a Fight

She liked to cook with oil. She liked to cook with salt. It made the food so good, but it made my heart palpitate. At some point, it doesn’t matter how much broccoli and spinach leaf you’re eating, because it’s completely doused in coronary-clogging lipids and enough sodium to slay a bull-moose. Oh we had the tastiest foods, we’d have hotpots filled to the brim with mushrooms, bok-choi, cauliflower, cucumber, dumpling, shrimp and beef slices. We’d have noodle dishes with cold vinegar vegetables on the side. Mounds of sautéed green beans, boiled asparagus. We’d dump the spicy meat and celery slices with its sauce on our white rice and scoop it into our mouths most proficiently with chopsticks. All of those good ingredients, all doused in oil and salt. It made it taste good, great – and we had our best times over meals like these. But just thinking about the ingredients made my heart palpitate.

Better to have had a heart attack, though, than to bring it up with her. I know because I tried, once. Normal relations broke down rapidly, and I couldn’t figure out how it happened. Another fight loomed on the horizon, the radar was picking up hostile missile locks being brought on target – and the target was me. All because I made a comment – and I’d tried to be nice about it. Perhaps I imposed upon her good graces. Certainly I’d assumed she’d not go ballistic, apoplectic, apocalyptic on me because I asked, simply asked, whether or not we might change how much we cook our food in oil and salt. Hell, I was downright nice. It didn’t pan out.