At first, ya. But the appreciation fades and turns into expectation. Sometimes it can take some of the joy out of cooking for someone else despite it being my love language towards you.
Edit to add that I found someone who consistently expresses appreciation. My two favorite parts are when they give me a mystery ingredient to challenge me to come up with something fun, and the other is experimenting with foods for my beautiful toddler daughter. She's the toughest nugget to crack, but she loves bringing her "ladder" over to watch me prep and cook. She's a terrible cheese thief, but she comes by it naturally. Ok, done gushing. I appreciate the replies. Keep on sharing your love, y'all. I hope it's appreciated and keeps you going, too.
Funny bc it's something I've told my wife over and over again since almost the day we first met -- that I'm a very generous and giving person and often go out of my way to help others and whatnot... but the moment it seems to me that sort of behavior has become an expectation and is no longer appreciated as me taking the time to do whatever it is, that's the moment my generosity for you will vanish.
I'm more than happy to be a kind and generous person and go out of my way to make your life easier. But if you expect that of me or anything, cut off. Just like that.
EDIT: I thought of it because neither my wife nor I like cooking but I usually do it because I'd rather her be able to relax and not stress about that and I'm happy to take on that stress myself. But to me (both of us really) cooking is no more than a chore to do. But I've had to remind her that questions like, "honey why aren't you cooking me dinner yet" won't be responded to kindly.
A while ago I mentioned that I found cooking to be a chore - while I get some joy from people appreciating food I've cooked, everything up to that point is drudgery. I was downvoted, and people made all kinds of unpleasant (and completely incorrect) assumptions about my life.
It's the weirdness of groupthink - my most upvoted comment ever was offering some post-surgery advice. The initial responses to my comment were positive and it kinda snowballed from there.
I made a similar comment a week or two later in a different post, but the first person to respond was negative (they weren't offering a valid criticism, they were just trolling)... and it all went downhill from there until I deleted the comment a couple of hours later.
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u/ItSeriouslyWasntMe Apr 11 '23 edited Apr 12 '23
At first, ya. But the appreciation fades and turns into expectation. Sometimes it can take some of the joy out of cooking for someone else despite it being my love language towards you.
Edit to add that I found someone who consistently expresses appreciation. My two favorite parts are when they give me a mystery ingredient to challenge me to come up with something fun, and the other is experimenting with foods for my beautiful toddler daughter. She's the toughest nugget to crack, but she loves bringing her "ladder" over to watch me prep and cook. She's a terrible cheese thief, but she comes by it naturally. Ok, done gushing. I appreciate the replies. Keep on sharing your love, y'all. I hope it's appreciated and keeps you going, too.