Dating Disasters·
HOTPOT STANDOFF
Two partners argue over meat in a hotpot, turning dinner into a sharp standoff before a frank talk reframes their meal as a shared, considerate effort.
Keep the pot shared or split the sides?
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The fight started over a pot of broth.
A vegetarian poster and their meat-eating boyfriend had managed their difference just fine, until a rare nice dinner came into view. The boyfriend came home with hotpot ingredients, and the poster saw the chance for a shared meal. Then came the snag: "I do not eat meat, my bf does," they wrote, "I would really like to share the hotpot but he insists on adding meat into it."
That one detail turned dinner into a standoff.
The poster did not want to ban meat from the table entirely. They suggested cooking it separately so the boyfriend could still eat it with the meal. "I'd rather cook the meat separately for him to eat with the meal," they explained, adding that they were willing to help with the cooking. To them, it seemed like a simple compromise: the hotpot stays shared, the meat stays optional.
The boyfriend was not interested.
According to the poster, he said he had to eat the meat in the pot and could not eat a meal without it specifically in the pot. When the poster pressed the point, "he shot the possibility down very fast." The response left them stuck between wanting to share the meal and worrying they were asking too much.
"Am I being stupid here and an ass for it?" the poster asked. "I don't want to be entitled," they wrote, but the whole thing made them feel like he had "just sorta blew me off." The boyfriend's answer was blunt enough that the poster summed it up in one line: "BF says its a nonstarter."
For a meal that was supposed to be special, the argument became oddly specific: not just meat, but meat in the pot. Not just dinner, but the exact way dinner had to be done.
Then came the update.
After the tension, the couple talked it through. "We had a nice little talk," the poster wrote. The boyfriend apparently had not realized how much sharing meals mattered to them. That detail shifted the conversation from a simple recipe dispute to a mismatch in expectations about what the meal was supposed to feel like.
The two of them landed on a plan for the future: try the hotpot again later, this time with meat as a side option. The poster called it "a pretty reasonable compromise." The update ended on a lighter note: "Hooray for problem solving and happy endings 🥰"