When it comes to the traits I’m looking for in a guy, nerdiness, a good sense of humor, and the ability to cook definitely top the list. In fact, I could never date a guy who doesn’t know his way around the kitchen—here’s why.
- Why would I want to be with someone who can’t take care of himself? Correct me if I’m wrong but learning how to feed yourself is an essential survival skill, right? If we were back in the caveman days, if you didn’t know how to get yourself fed, you’d die, simple as that. The same basic idea holds true today: if you don’t put food on your table, how are you going to eat? If a guy expects me to prepare hot meals for him every day, he needs to grow the hell up and dream on.
- Being lazy costs a lot of money—what a waste. Yeah, it’s convenient, quick, and easy to order food. Especially when we’re busy, it’s nice to be able to hit up GrubHub or even dial the pizza place around the corner and have a meal at our door within an hour. There’s nothing wrong with treating yourself once in a while, but if a guy is wasting money on takeout or fast food every day (or even multiple times a day), how much money is he spending exactly? That money could be put to so much better use, like taking me out on nice dates! (Kidding… sort of!)
- If he doesn’t want to learn or even try, how could he ever be a good boyfriend? What bugs me more than a guy who can’t cook is a guy that doesn’t even want to try and learn. Learning new things can be daunting at first but the more you do it, the easier it becomes! It’s not an attractive quality to be so stubborn or uninterested in improving yourself that you’re not even willing to try.
- Cooking isn’t much different than grilling. For some reason, there is this stigma that comes along with men being terrified of the kitchen but being masters on the grill. A grill is just an outside oven! I truly don’t understand why a guy is only super masculine if he does his cooking outside. A stove shouldn’t be more intimidating than a fire. He needs to get over it and just come back inside.
- There’s literally no excuse for not being able to prepare food for yourself. I’ve heard some guys say that they were never taught how to cook when they were younger and that’s why they continue to not know how to cook into adulthood. That’s no excuse when we’re talking about a grown adult. There are so many resources to learn simple recipes to actually learn how to cook. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t learn as kids that we figure out as adults, dude.
- It gives off the impression of being really immature. In my own experience, men who don’t cook still have the same expectations they did when they were living at home: they relax and sit on the couch expecting someone else to take care of them. If a guy honestly think he’s entitled to sit back and do absolutely nothing while a partner or his mother waits on him hand and foot, he’s got another thing coming.
- If a guy’s afraid of being seen as too feminine if he cooks, he needs to get a grip. Even today, home cooking is often thought of a woman’s job despite the fact that the culinary industry is mostly run by men. Talk about double standards. For me, it’s always been the guys that are less secure in their masculinity that worry about being emasculated that avoid more traditionally feminine things like the plague. If he can’t get past the idea that cooking certainly isn’t woman’s work, he’s definitely not the guy for me.
- If he thinks he can cook, he needs to have the goods to back it up. I was dating this guy and he kept bragging about how good he was at cooking. Incidentally, I didn’t actually get to taste anything he made until a few months into the relationship. Some special occasion came around and he decided to make me a steak for dinner and I was pretty pumped. It was really nice of him to do. The problem is that when I started eating it, I realized there was absolutely no seasoning—no salt and pepper, nothing. Uh, I thought he could cook? His ego got the better of him here and he didn’t have the goods to back it up. How disappointing.
