Veda Kestrel & Ciro Luthuli

I told Veda I enjoyed cooking because I did enjoy it. The problem was that she heard “competent home cook,” while I meant “enthusiastic person who owns a pan.” This distinction emerged on the evening I invited her for dinner after several months of dating. I had selected a recipe, doubled the quantities for no clear reason and bought mushrooms because they looked as though a confident person would buy them. When she arrived, I was wearing the expression of somebody trying to remember whether smoke had been mentioned in the instructions.

We had met on WaBanja. Her profile said she enjoyed a quiet evening but disliked the assumption that quiet people had nothing to say. I asked what subject could keep her talking. She answered that it depended on whether I wanted a short conversation or an argument about film endings. I chose the argument. By the time we met for coffee in a public place, we had already disagreed about two films neither of us could persuade the other to reconsider. It was a promising way to discover that disagreement did not have to become a contest.

In the first weeks, I wanted to seem accommodating. If she suggested an activity, I said it sounded good. This was pleasant until it became inaccurate. I went to a crowded event I did not enjoy, stood patiently through a shop visit that meant little to me, and assumed she would recognise my effort without being told. She could not, of course. From her perspective, she had invited someone who said he wanted to come. Afterwards I was tired and irritable, and she could not understand why a supposedly enjoyable day had made me so difficult.

Veda asked whether I actually liked the things we were doing. I was offended by the question because I liked her. She waited while I discovered that this was not an answer. Eventually I admitted that I had been afraid an honest preference would sound like a rejection. She said she could spend an afternoon shopping with a friend who enjoyed it, but she could not make sensible plans with a boyfriend who treated his own opinion as a secret. It was the first time the word boyfriend appeared in a conversation between us. I nearly missed that part.

The dinner was my attempt to contribute something I had chosen. Veda arrived, looked at the crowded counter and asked what she could do. I said everything was under control. Then the timer sounded, I dropped a spoon, and we both looked at a saucepan that appeared to disagree. She opened a window. I stopped pretending. We moved the less damaged ingredients into another pan and produced a meal that was perfectly edible if nobody asked what it had originally intended to become.

Halfway through dinner, she quietly moved the mushrooms to the edge of her plate. I apologised for having ruined them. She said they were fine; she simply did not like mushrooms. I asked why she had not said so. She gave me the sort of look that can contain an entire earlier conversation. We started laughing. Apparently I was not the only person trying to make another person comfortable by becoming unnecessarily agreeable. She had not wanted to criticise an evening I had worked hard to arrange. I would have preferred to feed her something she enjoyed.

We developed a habit after that. When making plans, we named one thing we wanted and one thing we did not. It was not a solemn exercise. Sometimes the requests were small: somewhere we could hear each other, no rushing between three venues, dinner before a late film rather than after it. We discovered that most differences were easy to accommodate when they arrived as information. They became difficult when somebody waited until the evening was over to reveal that an apparently cheerful yes had actually meant a resentful no.

There were larger questions too. Veda wanted to study again while working. I worried about how little time we might have, then worried that admitting it would sound selfish. She wanted to know what I thought, not what I imagined a supportive person ought to say. We worked out which evenings she could protect for study and which visits mattered to us. The arrangement changed as her workload changed. I learned to be proud of her without pretending that every adjustment was effortless. She learned that asking for time together was not the same thing as asking her to abandon something important.

In the photograph, she is wearing the red dress she chose for a family celebration, and I am in a white shirt that had already survived a very warm afternoon. Her hand is across my waist. Just before the picture, she told me there was a mark on my sleeve. I said nobody would see it. She pointed out that the photographer probably would. That was us by then: less interested in appearing perfectly compatible, more willing to mention the small thing while it could still be dealt with. We still cook together. The mushrooms stay on the side.