Cilantro, Always Cilantro

My partner, who I have been with for fourteen years, thinks cilantro tastes like soap. This is a real thing. It's genetic. I have read three articles about it, and I believe the science, and I understand that his suffering is not personal.

I still put cilantro in almost everything I cook. I have tried to stop. I cannot stop. Cilantro is to my food what a key change is to a pop song — the thing that lifts the bridge into the chorus. Without it I am making something else, and the something else is worse, and I will not pretend otherwise.

For years this was a small fight. I cooked; he'd flinch; I'd feel guilty; he'd feel ungrateful; we'd eat anyway. Somewhere around year nine I landed on the only solution that has ever worked, which is: I cook with cilantro, and then I make him a small bowl of whatever I cooked, without cilantro, from a portion I set aside before the herb went in. It takes me thirty extra seconds. He gets the food he can eat. I get the food I need to cook.

The thing about love I learned from cilantro is that compromise does not always mean splitting the difference. Sometimes it means doing the whole thing twice — a little — because the thing matters to both of you and neither of you will enjoy a watered-down version. Thirty seconds. Fourteen years. Still married.