Inspired by the posts of fellow WAGS to those in the chef-ing business I decided I would provide my own opinion of being attached to a man who quite simply, is 90% of the time a ghost of himself.
Whilst I don't want to give the impression that this man encompasses my entire world, the reality is that being with a chef has meant the swift deterioration of many other social aspects of my life. Long gone are the Saturday nights spent out with friends, I now spend them watching TV - trying with all my might not to fall asleep - waiting to pick my boyfriend up after work as he finishes too late to catch the last train. In all the time I have been with my chef I have never actually been taken on a proper date: he is either working, exhausted or broke. I am constantly covering for him when his pitiful wages fail to. The most time I spend with him is on the drive to the train station in the morning (which consists of 4 minutes spent in silence as he is simply too tired to be able to talk), or 30 minutes in the middle of the night when he returns from work as I get out of bed to sit with him while he eats his dinner and washes his chef whites. When we do talk he is mainly complaining about how little money he has, the perils of living in London (as his is a Scot through and through) and his ridiculous hours at work.
Listing these few examples of what being with a chef can entail the words are screaming at me saying "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING? THIS RELATIONSHIP DOES NOT WORK. IT MUST BE ENDED." And I am certain that if I raised any of this with friends they would think that I had fallen and hit my head. I, myself, reading this blog one year ago would have thought the author was completely insane. But the reality is, that for all of it's faults being a chef is the thing I admire most about him, and if this wasn't what he did he quite simply would not be the man I fell in love with.
That is certainly not to say that his career is WHY I fell in love with him. However, his career is all encompassing, it's his passion and he moves, thinks, talks as a chef does. My chef has been working in a kitchen since he was 14 and seeing him cook, or talk about food something comes over him that makes all those negatives just melt away.
So you put up with the late nights, lack of contact, loneliness, absence of social life, inability to be able to plan anything in advance (the list goes on), because it is what makes him, HIM. I would never ask him to change his career, and I would never want him to. The problem arises when you can't talk about it. I don't want to load him with more and more layers of guilt, because I know he wants to be there. He wants to be able to do all things I want to do, he wants to finish work at a reasonable hour and come home and have dinner together, he doesn't want to be so exhausted on his day off that he spend half of it in bed, he wants to go out with friends and see family and go on holidays. So that is why I have decided to write this down here, I don't want it to be thought of as a list of my complaints and grievances because it most certainly will not be. It will simply provide me with the ability to claw back some sense of sanity to be able to discuss my relationship without having to face the dazed and confused faces of my friends and family.
