发生在厨房里的两性战争

Your mother probably taught you that the fastest way to win someone's heart is to cook a meal.

Too bad she didn't mention the broken dishes.

Doug McGrath can tell you all about them. He worked as a short-order cook in high school and still prepares food by memory, often throwing in a dash of salt or a splash of oil to taste. His wife, Tina, by contrast, prefers to follow recipes meticulously.

Throughout their 32 years of marriage, the McGraths have thrown plates, spaghetti and mashed potatoes at the walls of their kitchen as their tempers flared. (Mr. McGrath says he has learned from hard experience that the latter dry to the consistency of concrete.)

'If you have never woken up hung over and had to dig a broken piece of crockery out of the wall before you replaster it, you probably don't understand married life,' says the 55-year-old Mr. McGrath, vice president of finance at a student-loan company in Phoenix.

Sure, the kitchen is often considered the heart of the home -- a place of physical and emotional sustenance, where family bonds are strengthened and memories are created. But it can also be a seething cauldron of power plays, resentment and passive-aggressive behavior.

Couples bicker over everything from whether dish towels should be used to wipe counters to how long you can eat food past its expiration date. Who cooks? Who cleans? How do you properly load a dishwasher, anyway? It is amazing we manage to break bread instead of heads.

Consider this exchange, courtesy of Paul W. Barada, 63, president of an employee-screening firm in Rushville, Ind.

'Where's the wine opener, honey?' he asks his wife.

'Where it always is,' she says.

'Where's that?'

'We've had this house for 20 years, and you don't know where the wine opener is?'

'I guess not.'

'It's in the corner cabinet.'

'Which shelf?'

'Oh, for heaven's sake.'

Recently, I've been asking people how their most important relationships fare in the kitchen.

I started with my parents, both of whom are great cooks. Just last weekend I saw my mom body-check my dad when he tried to taste a sauce she was seasoning. Yet when pressed, my dad claimed never to have experienced marital tension over something related to cooking. He did offer this gem up, though, out of the blue: 'My mother never considered using a dishwasher.' I wish you could have seen my mom's eyes roll.

I talked to more couples. One woman complained of failing to 'train' her husband to rinse the dishes well enough and having to clean them all herself. One man explained how he deliberately leaves a partial mess if he has to make his own dinner after a long day of work. Another man told how he carefully rearranges the dishes in the dishwasher 'like in the ads' after his wife loads it.

'I now fully understand the Hundred Years' War,' said one 52-year-old Texas man, whose wife insists they use a pair of ornate salt and pepper shakers that require hearty twisting to season their food.

Talk to therapists -- or divorce attorneys -- and they will tell you that when couples clash over dishwashers, wine openers or salt, there is probably something else going on in the relationship.

Take the McGraths and their mashed potatoes. They admit their kitchen spats have more to do with power struggles than food. 'I am a grown man and don't need a mother to tell me how to do something right,' says Mr. McGrath. (Ms. McGrath, 53, says she and her husband cannot even be in the kitchen together when one of them is cooking: 'Neither of us is open to saying we want to be corrected.')

Early in Lindsey Johnson's marriage, the dishwasher became a flash point. She did all the cooking, despite having a full-time job. But she expected her husband, Jay, to help clean up by stacking the soiled dishes in the dishwasher immediately after a meal.

Mr. Johnson had a different method of operation. He believed that the dishwasher should not be run until it was full. And he felt it was a waste of time to load the machine until there were enough dishes to fill it up. Hence, he often let dirty dishes pile up in the sink for days.

The Johnsons argued all the time about the stalemate. 'I was afraid that if he didn't care about how I felt about this, what else wouldn't he care about?' says Ms. Johnson, 31, a content manager for a Web site in Oklahoma City. (Mr. Johnson, 35, a computer programmer, says he didn't realize how upset his wife was.)

Then one morning, she had an epiphany after a shower: 'It occurred to me that there were not enough towels in the linen cabinet to fill it up,' says Ms. Johnson. 'And if we shouldn't put dishes in the dishwasher until it is full, then possibly the same rule applies to cabinets.'

So she dumped all of the towels from the linen closet into the bathroom sink. She took all the toiletries from under the vanity and tossed them on the counter, too. Then she left for work without speaking to her husband.

'I think he was really confused,' says Ms. Johnson. 'But the dishes are always done right away now.'