Cooking with your partner can be a beautiful way to bond and wind down at the end of a long day, as well as offering a chance to catch up over a delicious meal.
But one woman has revealed that she used an argument with her partner over cooking techniques to teach him a lesson, and it triggered a debate online.
Taking to popular Reddit forum 'Am I the Asshole?', the woman revealed that while she loves cooking with her partner, his blasé attitude towards cross-contamination drives her "insane".
"As a result, I feel like I have to constantly keep an eye on him to make sure that he is sanitizing things properly," she explained.
"It frustrates me that I feel like I have to watch him, and it frustrates him whenever I point out something he's done that seems unsanitary."
The woman said things came to a head last week when they were making Mexican carnitas together. "I noticed that he was using the same knife and cutting board that he had used to chop raw pork, to then chop up onions and radishes," she wrote.
"I could literally see red splotches on the cutting board from where the meat had been sitting."
The woman tried to gently explain that she would always prepare produce first, so she could use the same knife and cutting board without having to worry about cross-contamination.
"I then told him that we couldn't use the onions and radishes for this dish because I was not about to top my carnitas with them now that they were contaminated with raw pork."
She said her boyfriend "flipped out".
"[He] kept saying 'It's not like it's chicken'. I said, 'So what? It's still raw meat and there's still potential for foodborne illness.'
"He wouldn't let it go so finally I was like, 'Fine, I'll eat your tainted f**king produce', which pissed him off further.
"He stormed off into our bedroom and refused to finish cooking with me. Without him knowing, I cut up new onions and radishes for garnishing and we ate dinner separately."
The next day the pair were supposed to go to a congratulatory dinner at the man's parent's house, as he had recently gotten a new job.
"I faked being ill and hung out in bed watching Netflix and reading most of the day," the woman admitted.
"He seemed baffled by my being sick. I was like, 'Idk, I mean I did eat those onions and radishes that you were so pressed about'."
She let him go to his parents' house alone and said she received messages from his family accusing her of being "extremely rude" and "an unsupportive girlfriend" for missing the event.
"I do feel guilty about missing this dinner since it was important to him," the woman wrote.
"But I was also at my wits' end as I've tried to talk about the contamination thing with him nicely MANY times in the past, but he always gets pissed off about it and then doesn't change his ways."
The woman asked the internet if she was being unreasonable in the situation, and the response was perhaps not what she was hoping for.
"What kind of hinky high school horseshit makes a grown woman need to be right so bad that she fakes being sick to the point of missing out on an important event for her partner?" one person questioned.
"You're not entitled to lie to your boyfriend to teach him things, and you chose a horrible time to do it where you weren't there for him to celebrate his achievement with his family," another pointed out.
"You can point him to information about cross-contamination, or you can refuse to eat anything he cooks until he learns the hard way by poisoning himself. But you do not get to manipulate and deceive and control another human."
Others put it more succinctly.
"Seriously, just break up. What are you even staying for?" one person questioned.
It's not the first Reddit relationship breakdown to make headlines. Recently, one new mother claimed she was forced to kick her husband out of the delivery room during the birth of their child, due to his stress and sobbing.
