Division of Labor

INP has an interesting little write-up about Chuseok and men and food preparation, which got me to thinking about my own Busan (the Boy).

When we live together, the cooking gets divided more or less evenly, because the Boy is (praise be to the homemaking gods) competent in the kitchen. If anything, the Boy cooks dinner more often than I do. We each have our "signature" dishes, and whoever cooks is (well, partially) determined by what we feel like eating. Whoever doesn't cook does the dishes. Plus I gladly go on dessert-making binges that last us for weeks. Balance is maintained.

Of course, the Boy doesn't live in a country that expects its men to be the only breadwinners and works them 60 hours a week, so he has plenty of time and energy to learn how to cook. Also, I don't think his mom ever threatened to make a eunuch out of him if he set foot in the kitchen (a threat some of my male Korean acquaintances have gotten from their grandmothers wielding big fuck-off knives).

My running joke that if Sweden and the Boy don't work out, I'll come back to Korea, enter into a marriage-of-F6-visa-convenience, and open a 24 hour breakfast place. A marriage-of-visa-convenience only, note; the prospect of shifting from the kind of relationship I've had for approximately a million years to the kind I could expect with most Korean guys is a depressing one.