Forget stacking the dishwasher, this is the kitchen habit that can easily lead to divorce. There’s a tiny thing that I always do – but one day it led to the biggest row in our 12-year relationship. This is how we saved our marriage

The kitchen worktop is piled with dirty pans as we finally sit down to eat. My food mixer is encrusted with shredded carrot, there’s an empty chickpea tin that needs rinsing and the baking tray is still covered in hot sauce from the chicken wings.

Meanwhile, the sous-vide machine in the utility room is cooling down.

You might assume we’ve been laboriously crafting a celebratory dinner party for 12, but no – it’s an ordinary week night, and it’s just the two of us eating a quick meal before we slump in front of Netflix, like every other mid-life couple.

My husband Andy and I, both 55, live in a small cottage in the West Highlands of Scotland and share a kitchen that boasts a gas stove with three working burners, a single worktop, and a kitchen table usually covered in work detritus, bills and a sleeping cat.

In some ways, we’re very well suited when it comes to food – we both love cooking, and both enjoy buying ingredients, consulting recipes and experimenting with new tastes.

The only problem is, we have completely different diets. I am a veggie – with occasional reluctant forays into fish – and a former vegan, who once edited a plant-based food magazine.

He loves nothing more than to craft his supper from a haunch of venison or a whole oxtail. 

I eat salad, beans, peas; he eats meat every day. The nearest I come to a burger is in large cap mushroom form; he is severely allergic to fungi. I cook like the Swedish Chef from The Muppets, flinging bits of parsley to the floor and discarding vegetable peelings as I go.

He assembles all his ingredients beforehand, dices everything into perfect cubes and immediately clears away any debris. You could easily perform an emergency tracheotomy on any surface where he’s recently prepared food.

No, when it comes to kitchen and dietary habits, we are totally and utterly incompatible – Jack Sprat and his wife – to the extent that in four years of marriage and a decade of living together, we have almost never eaten the same dinner.

I often find myself musing about how on earth we’ve made it work without nightly shouting matches.

Plenty of people can’t. Earlier this year a study found that 20 per cent of Britons consider it a relationship deal-breaker if their partner’s diet doesn’t fit with their own, rising to 47 per cent – almost half! – if one’s a vegan and the other isn’t.

We all know that dishwasher stacking habits can fuel relationship problems, and that the dirty cup by the sink can even prompt divorce.

But as unusual diets increase in popularity – from ‘mindful’ to fibremaxxing to carnivore to anti-UPF – the kitchen wars have surely moved into the fridge, oven and larder, where completely different food philosophies compete for precious shelf space.

When Andy and I met via a mutual friend 12 years ago, I was a long-term vegetarian. I was used to eating vegetable pasta, plant-based curries and occasionally supplementing dishes with veggie mince.

I wasn’t a total purist: I didn’t mind roasting a turkey at Christmas as long as I didn’t have to eat it.

My main concern was for animal welfare, but I also loved the healthy tastes and textures of vegetarian food, and felt I was doing my bit for the planet.

Andy, meanwhile, grew up in the depths of rural Scotland, where managing deer populations, cattle auctions and even shooting parties are entirely normal.

The first time I went to stay with him at the remote cottage where we still live, we had a heated debate about vegetarianism. For me, an animal-loving liberal from urban Manchester, his brisk, practical attitude towards consuming the flesh of other creatures was an outrage.

I didn’t understand how, like most country folk, he could adore his dogs yet happily eat pigs, which are generally considered to have equivalent intelligence.

Luckily, Andy is both thoughtful and calm, so rather than allowing our debate to descend into a full-on row, he carefully explained his views (we evolved to eat meat, we need protein and iron, and without animal husbandry there’d be no bovine or ovine animals at all) and added that he respected mine. Our positions haven’t changed much since.

Andy also has a well-managed auto-immune condition that means he can’t digest much fibre and eats meat daily, whereas my rigorously wholesome diet contains more fibre than a straw hut.

Between 2016 and 2019 I even went entirely vegan while I edited that vegan food magazine – until a belatedly diagnosed severe nickel allergy (nickel is found in significant quantities in vegan staples like pulses, soy and nuts) meant I had to dial down the roughage, return to dairy and reluctantly add some fish to my diet.

What all this means is that shopping, cooking and eating in our household has become a rather complex dance.

Buying food is a process that generally takes at least two hours. We live 15 miles from the nearest shops, and visit twice a week. At the excellent deli, Marmalade, Andy will treat himself to good coffee, blue cheese and fancy crisps while I might invest in giant olives and re-stock my dried grain supplies.

He’ll then head to the butcher for salami, steak, venison mince and chicken while I might buy a salmon fillet. We generally buy seasonally and prefer the quality of the deli over the supermarket.

At the Co-op he’ll get broccoli and cabbage and I’ll buy peppers and mushrooms. If we shop separately, as we often do, we’ll message one another what we need, and as we’re both self-employed – I’m a writer and he runs a holiday house – whoever has more money in the bank that week will pay.

Of course, the grocery bill would be a great deal cheaper if we ate the same things. But while we inevitably overspend, we don’t take many holidays, we haven’t redecorated in more than a decade and good food brings us both joy.

I don’t object to visiting the butcher for him as long as the meat is tightly wrapped and I don’t have to touch it – fortunately, it’s not the kind of shop where carcasses dangle from the ceiling or violent dismembering is carried out in plain sight.

In truth, the real problems start not at the shops but when it comes to the planning, prep and post-meal cleaning up.

‘It’s just… your timing,’ Andy says wearily. ‘You never know what you’re going to cook, so we hardly ever eat at the same time.’

I can’t argue. I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, which might explain why most days I don’t decide what I want to eat until around seven, usually by staring into the fridge and summoning inspiration.

Andy, by contrast, plans his meals several days ahead. Always interested in kitchen gadgets, he acquired a sous-vide a few years ago – a water-bath machine, used in restaurants to keep food at a consistent temperature. He uses it to safely slow-cook meat for hours, which suits his digestion and palate.

It also means he’ll invest in huge cuts of meat and live off the resulting stew or ragu for days, and can warm up a meal in ten minutes. Sometimes, he’ll keep his food hot and wait to sit down with me. At others, it results in me standing at the stove, my back to him, while he eats his dinner half a foot away (it really is a small kitchen).

Then there’s the mess. My mess. Vegetarian and pescatarian meals often require lots of different components and, as well as using several pans, I end up doing a lot of travelling to and fro between the cupboard, fridge and spice-rack as I cook, inevitably getting in Andy’s way as he neatly stirs his pan.

Generally, before we begin, he’ll ask, ‘Which hob do you need? Are you using the oven?’, and I will attempt to guess my answer and then we’ll dance around each other negotiating kitchen appliances. We often run into trouble when I’m planning to cook something at 170C and he needs the heat blasting at 220. Usually, he’s already told me and I’ve forgotten, so he wins and I change my plan at the last minute.

It’s perhaps little wonder that we don’t always manage to finish cooking at the same time.

At least twice a week, though, we do somehow synchronise and sit down to eat together. I’ve often been asked if I mind Andy cooking and eating meat opposite me, but the truth is I don’t. The only meal of his that genuinely traumatises me is the one he requested for his birthday last month: steak and kidney pie. Kidneys remind me of inedible school dinners, I can’t bear the smell and their bloody appearance horrifies me.

In the end, I made him deal with the kidney part and I handled the pastry, shuddering at the proximity of offal. In our food Venn diagram there’s a tiny handful of dishes in the centre that we will both eat, including a Portuguese fish stew that Andy makes and a paella – though mine is, of course, meat-free.

We also share the excellent sourdough loaves that Andy trained himself to make in lockdown – and we’re not above going halves on a large bag of chilli crisps, though usually not at the same time, which leads to extreme disappointment when it becomes clear the other one finished it earlier.

As for entertaining, we’ve found ways around the issue. When we have friends over for dinner – which living in a small rural community, we often do – we either take turns to cook, or Andy does the main course and I make the starter and pudding. Naturally, being rural people, many of our friends are meat-eaters, but they generally don’t object to my lavish Lebanese mezze or spreads of vegetarian curries.

Andy tends to serve restaurant-standard meat and veg, however, so for me, he’ll often craft a vegetarian version of the lamb, beef or chicken everyone else is having, with porcini mushrooms and seitan flour. I’ve never been disappointed.

When we mention this, people stare at us as though we’re certifiable, but we are also the couple who catered for 50 guests at our own wedding, so it’s fair to say we enjoy complicated cookery – albeit not together.

It’s not all a vision of marital harmony and acceptance.

‘Oh God, the sink,’ Andy groans when I mention this. The washing-up is where it all falls apart.

Andy may leave pots and pans on the worktop, but generally, they’re stacked in an orderly fashion, ready for him to wash up later via his usual military regime of cutlery, glasses, china and pans.

Unlike him, I grew up with a perfectly good dishwasher and loathe washing up with every atom of my being.

I hate the sound of scraping plates, I despise the little bits of vegetable matter that congregate in the plughole, and the dish rack is too high for me to reach easily, so I generally end up smashing crockery while water drips down my sleeve.

As a result of this aversion, I tend to abandon used mugs wherever I finish my tea, leave my encrusted pans on the stove and heap everything else into a tottering Jenga pile. Yes, I am the woman who leaves the cup/plate/glass by the sink. When I do get round to it, I have occasionally committed the mortal sin of leaving a cloth in the sink, too, rather than rinsing it and hanging it up to dry (of course, after Andy’s washed up, there’s a series of pristine white squares neatly clipped over the sink).

This led to one of our most passionate rows, which began when he emitted a groan worthy of Scotland crashing out of the World Cup.

‘What?’ I asked, with some panic.

‘The cloth,’ he said, teeth gritted, voice barely controlled. ‘It’s in the sink again. How many times do I have to –’

At that point, my feminist rage ballooned. ‘Don’t speak to me as if I’m your chattel!’ I shrieked, and it continued from there:

‘Bacteria!’

‘Patronising!’

‘Slovenly!’

‘Captain von Trapp!’

We didn’t speak for several hours, during which time I Googled ‘cloth, sink, bacteria’ and realised he was right.

I now do not leave cloths in the sink and we still don’t have a dishwasher because, where we live, the water runs straight into a stream and destroys the fish.

We even use special eco washing up liquid. I’ve got used to it.

Over the years, friends have occasionally asked if we’ve ever considered simply giving in and giving the other’s diet a whirl?

That way, we could eat the same things, cook together, save money, create less washing up… and yet despite all the positives, I can safely say no, we never have, for many reasons.

Firstly, Andy’s inability to digest much fibre, secondly, my love of animals and hatred of modern farming practices (and yes I worry about dairy and fish too) and thirdly – perhaps most importantly – we simply like different things.

Andy doesn’t eat breakfast, mindlessly absorbs a cheese and ham sandwich for lunch and drinks coffee. I do eat breakfast, usually a bowl of yoghurt and fruit.

I’ll have a salad or a baked sweet potato for lunch, and I drink decaf tea. I used to drink alcohol but I barely bother now, while he hugely enjoys a bottle of good red to accompany his red meat.

He generally hates puddings unless they involve poached pears, while I’ve never met a dessert I didn’t like.

We’re lucky we didn’t get together until our early forties, when my child-rearing, family-meal era was over, so we’re able to indulge our own tastes.

In fact, we’re so used to running entirely different personal restaurants from the same tiny kitchen, it never strikes us as odd.

And thankfully, when we head for the living room and flick the TV on after dinner, we almost always agree on what to watch.