Relationships with other people are a handy means of establishing just how normal and correct you are and how weird and wrong everyone else is.
We like to think we know people once we have spent a few months living with them. This is enough time to find out if they have unnerving habits that point to something more sinister about their character. Like how protective they are over a stash of hard drives hidden under the stairs. Or finding “How long does a body take to decompose?” in their recent Google searches. Or worse, how they leave liquids in their bag every time they go through airport security, delaying their travel companions for 20 minutes while they wait at the desk of shame for their bag to be put back through the machine.
However, it can take years for the true horrors to surface about the person you share your life and even a bathroom with. The good news is that, when there are countless ways you can be repulsed by your nearest and dearest, it keeps long-term relationships fresh. There is a neverending list of behaviours that will cause you to look at the people you love most and demand with disgust, “What is wrong with you?”
We’ve all cleaned up our partner’s vomit or seen our friend clip their toenails and leave them behind like horrific little carpet confetti. That’s small-time stuff. We expect those things to give us the ick. We are ready for it, holding our nose and armed with bleach.
It’s the things they do that surprise us that are the worst. Things we thought were beyond the realm of human decency, because we don’t do them. Things we thought were unspoken rules that everyone adhered to so society doesn’t descend into chaos.
My sense of world order and, to a lesser extent, confidence in my relationship was brought to its knees by a potato last week. A singular spud caused this crisis of faith.
It had sprouted. And it was about to be served for dinner.
The shoots were green and multiple centimetres in length. They acted as a revolting little kickstand, propping up the potato on the chopping board. The exterior was dry with little white lines criss-crossing the surface like elbow skin in need of a good moisturiser.
“What’s that?” I asked my partner, hoping he would say “science experiment”.
“Dinner,” he said. “I’m making fish and chips.”
“With this?” I asked, holding up the rotting corpse of the artist formerly known as potato.
“It’s grand,” he replied.
I have lived long enough to know that when people say a situation is grand, it’s a good indication it is not. These people aren’t liars, just dangerous optimists, which can be worse.
“It’s soft,” I countered with caution.
“I’ll just cut that off. I’ve made these for you loads of time and you’ve been fine,” he said.
“What? Loads of times?!”
We have lived together for years and he does the majority of the cooking. He had been feeding me compost week in, week out. I had been disposing of the rare sprouted spud at the bottom of the box in the usual responsible manner – throwing them out, whispering “yuck” to myself. But he had been hoarding them and serving them up this whole time.
I tried to hold space for him, which is Gwyneth Paltrow speak for trying to figure out a good reason why someone does something instead of yelling “You are a minging freak!”
The impacts of intergenerational trauma from the Famine and food scarcity in Ireland are well documented. We get our attitudes to food from our family environment so this could be a plausible explanation. As is Irish tradition, I could blame this problem on the Brits and be done with it.
“We live a 10-minute walk from the shop, where we can buy a 4kg bag of them for under a fiver,” I reassured him. “We can just get new ones, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
“It does,” he said with a vague but concerning gravity.
To stop the hysterical “What are you hiding, what do you know?” questions from me, he surrendered the spud and made pasta instead.
The spud was planted into the veggie patch, where its offspring will feed us for many dinners to come. And also the trust issues in our relationship, relating to food safety.