Man there are times like this where.. it's gone to long. Yeah, maybe at first there a chance at first.. but it's like meeting your coworker or neighbors and instantly forgetting their name, so you call them buddy, for like the next year or so until you over hear someone calling their name.

Gotta grade this one on the boomer curve

Right. Communication is hard for some relationships. He could have asked her to try it with a different meat or just veggies for a change. Then say he likes that dish better. Gush over how much better it is, if he is trying to make her feel good.

Naw, it IS sweet because Grandpa's love for Grandma is STRONGER than his hatred for chicken ☺️

Honesty is hot.

People say this, but also the "I'm just being honest" thing is also known as a faux pas / red flag. Like, I always see the "No, you're just an asshole" response. It came up a lot on AITA and similar subs back in the reddit days. I've seen it here too.

So honesty is really one of those things that's only hot until someone does it in real life and it doesn't go as perfectly smooth as it does in stories.

Like, she prepares him meals presumably every day and has been doing so for fifty years, and he wants to complain that he doesn't like what she cooks?!? That would be a completely different story. I could see him as an old entitled curmudgeon saying "you know I hate chicken, woman!"

We can try to imagine a better scenario. Say it's the 1970s and these are newlywed sweethearts, still in the honeymoon phase. This strapping young buck gets home from his new job at the factory and his beautiful wife, still wearing her apron, cheerfully puts a steaming hot plate of chicken in front of him. He looks her in the eyes with that winning smile and says "Honey, I must be honest with you. I hate chicken. Always have."

Her smile runs away from her face, but before the tears can come out of her eyes she tells him firmly "Then you can cook your own dinners, Maurice!" Untying her apron on her way to the door, she hangs it on the peg and storms out, slamming the door behind her. Oblivious to her sobs in the other room, Maurice says "I wonder what's gotten into her," as he scarfs down her lovingly crafted meal because, well, he's hungry after all, and chicken apparently isn't so intolerable to him anyway.

A week later, things have blown over. Maurice and Peggy are back to their usual routines. Peggy still cooks dinner, only now she only does chicken twice a week instead of five times a week. But the spark is gone, and it never returns. The honeymoon phase has passed. For the rest of their days they coexist tolerably, but the romance they once felt is now a faint memory, fading more with each passing day.

Fast forward to today, they've been married for fifty years and have grandchildren, one of whom is posting on bluesky about how her grandfather is such a bitter old curmudgeon that when grandma was taking a nap, all he could say was "That woman should know by now that I hate chicken! She's trying to kill me, she is!"

Like, at what point between "honeymoon phase" and "curmudgeon phase" is it okay to say "Actually, dear, I've always hated chicken. I've only been pretending to like it to preserve your feelings and show you how much I appreciate you."

Turns out they're based on reality.

The difference is that you are making a choice to eat them.When OOOOOP ate the chicken, he wasnt making a choice to try to like chicken - he felt like he had to to keep his wife happy. So he ate it hating every bite, reinforcing the "badness" of the taste.

Just fucking eat them

And make sure you get well-made stuff. I used to hate kimchi until I tried some that was really well-prepared. Turns out I'd only ever tried poorly-made kimchi.

I could see this going either way.

I was an au pair and the primary cook for the non-meat parts of lunch, dinner, and dessert for 10-18 people every day for a couple of summers when I was 16-17 (I never realized how weird it was to give me that much responsibility at that age), because the family I was with had bought an old farm with their best friends and the adults spent all day renovating the buildings. They weren’t farmers, which is why they had planted zucchini in the open field next to several acres of essentially empty space (their neighbor harvested hay from their land, but they were concentrating on the buildings at that point).

They gave me 30 zucchini a day and I made them into tarts, fritters, all manner of ratatouilles, and cakes. I grilled them, fried them, baked them, and pickled them. I ate them for three meals a day (the earliest riser made zucchini pancakes for breakfast every morning, of course), every day.

I was lukewarm on zucchini beforehand (it’s too wet to treat as a vegetable and not sweet enough to treat as a fruit), but afterwards I hated it. Passionately.

In my mid-twenties, I signed up for a farm share and suddenly had to find a way to eat zucchini again for the first time in years. I couldn’t stomach the thought of any of my previous repertoire, but zoodles were a fad by then and it was different from anything else I had had, so I gave it a shot.

At first, they still weren’t my bag, but after eating them a couple of times a week while being able to tweak my preparation to only my preferences, I developed a taste for them again. Now I can even occasionally enjoy a ratatouille, which is peak wet zucchini. It never sends me on a positive memory journey though.

dry

Properly cooked it shouldn't be.