“I’ll have the calf brains as an appetizer and rabbit for my entrée,” my boyfriend Ray told the server at the fancy French restaurant where he’d taken me to dinner. Some vegetarians would have been appalled by these choices. But by the time I met Ray, in my late 40s, I’d had a dozen years experience being a vegetarian who dated carnivores.
Other men I had gone out with had asked, before ordering, if having meat on the dinner table would repulse me. For some, the experience of ordering cooked animals while dining with a vegetarian triggered all kinds of confessions about their poor eating choices, as if I had laser vision into their refrigerators. For others, my own choice of entrees seemed to act like a Rorschach test prompting them to free associate about the wonderful meat-based meals they shared with loved ones—Mom’s roast turkey. Grandma’s juicy prime rib. An ex-girlfriend’s succulent lamb shish kebabs.
It often seemed to me that dining with a vegetarian made my carnivores dates more uneasy than I was. To ease their obvious discomfort, and to make up for the fact that I could never offer to cook them a gourmet meat-based meal, I’d tease, “My sensual range is not in the kitchen.”
According to a poll conducted by Today.com and Match.com, carnivores consider sharing a common passion for food to be a top priority when dating. The same poll found that vegetarians are far less bothered by their mate’s culinary preferences. According to a 2012 Love Bites study, 30 percent of carnivores refuse to date vegetarians or vegans altogether.
When I first became a vegetarian in my 30s, I made up my mind that I would not proselytize about my food choices on dates, or anywhere else. Why shouldn’t Ray order whatever he wanted, even if seeing brains on his plate made my own brain want to explode? As long as he didn’t expect me to munch on a bunny rabbit.
As I got to know Ray better, I began to understand why it was so important for him to eat the way he did. “My parents wouldn’t let me leave the dinner table as a child until I ate all my peas,” he confided. “I hated peas. So I would sit there until I fell asleep at the table.” I came to respect Ray’s passion for being his own person, so much that I not only tolerated my boyfriend’s eating meat, I even let him cook a Thanksgiving turkey at my house.
Lee, whom I met a few years after Ray and I split up, didn’t cook, (but he always did the dishes). “What do you mean you prepare chicken and fish for him?” my concerned vegetarian friends chided. “I would never date a man who ate meat.” Other veg friends said that while they wouldn’t rule out dating someone who ate dead animals, they certainly wouldn’t cook them for him.
“No red meat in our house,” I told Lee when we got married, even as I agreed to broil chicken and fish for him. As time went on, he often sampled food from my plate. It was refreshing to hear a man say, “Thank you for turning me on to healthy eating,” rather than extolling his favorite meat dishes and guilty eating pleasures. (Still, I learned through the grapevine that during the early years of our marriage, a colleague brought him roast beef sandwiches because she felt sorry that I was “depriving” him.)
Largely due to my example, Lee eventually stopped eating red meat. “I’m a vegetarian in training,” he announces with pride when a friend asks about his food preferences, even though we both know he has no intention of ever going the distance. But it is that “in training” spirit about Lee that enables me to tolerate smelling up the house with his salmon, or watching a chicken breast wiggle as I plop it on a plate for seasoning.
These days, Lee not only occasionally partakes of my vegan meals (Philly “cheesesteak” made with seitan is his favorite), but also explores other non-mainstream leanings of mine with the same open-mindedness—meditation, laughing yoga, and Tantric sex.
Cooking would be a lot easier if my husband and I both ate the same foods. And it’s true that I feel closest to him at the table on those rare occasions when our plates look identical. Yes, it would be wonderful if he were inclined to whip up stir-fried vegetables and quinoa for me, and get over eating dead animals.
But it gives me hope that my vegetarian-in-training has come around to being the kind of guy who, at a restaurant, will sometimes utter that famous line from When Harry Met Sally: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
