The Key to My Domestic Bliss? Not Cooking

My husband makes all of our meals, and I don't feel guilty about it. Here's why.

- Zahra Khozema

GROWING UP IN A Pakistani household, I never saw a man cook. The kitchen was my mother’s domain, and like many immigrant moms, she made it her lab for blending cultures. She’d swap out traditional ingredients when they were too hard to find in suburban Toronto—like when she made nihari, a rich, meaty stew, and served it with tortillas instead of naan. She'd also tone down the spice to accommodate my younger sister’s developing palate. I watched her and assumed, one day, I'd do the same.

But I didn’t. I developed a fear of handling raw meat as a kid thanks to Eid al-Adha, the Muslim holiday of sacrifice. My family would buy goats or cows weeks in advance, and I'd name them and get attached. The emotional whiplash of feeding an animal one day and seeing it butchered the next stuck with me. Whenever Mom was away, my meals were mostly cheese or scrambled egg sandwiches or leftover chicken nuggets from the night before—also sandwiched. Cooking felt like something I'd eventually have to sort out, especially once I had a family.

Then I met my husband. Fast forward to today, and I haven’t cooked a single meal in years—and I have no regrets. My mother pulls her dupatta a little tighter around herself whenever I brag about my husband’s cooking. She knows that if anyone else were around they might ask: “But why don’t you cook?” The answer is simple: I don’t have to.

It has nothing to do with a lack of care or laziness and everything to do with rejecting outdated expectations. My partner and I both work full-time from home and split bills equitably. It only makes sense that our division of household labour reflects our lifestyle.