Let me repeat.

Your boyfriend doesn’t care about what you ate today.

This is important. He may listen to you summarize the details of your daily gastronomical adventures. He may exclaim over your decision to go with arugula instead of baby spinach in your tossed salad. But he doesn’t care. You should accept this and talk about something else. Trust me.

This is not intended to be misogynistic – its entirely possible that guys do this, and if you’re out there – you really need to stop too. This is a simple courtesy… I think the world would be a better place if everyone just accepted this basic rule: If someone is giving you a run down on everything they ate today, you can tell them to shut up.

A few years ago, I was dating a girl who suffered from this affliction. She was great otherwise, but in this small area, it was pretty bad. Here’s an example of the kind of conversation we’d have:

“This morning, before I got to work, I stopped at the Starbucks and got a Grande latte… but I only drank like half of it, and then I got a bagel and some cream cheese and ate a quarter of it and put it in my bag and saved it for later so I could eat it at my desk, cause sometimes I get hungry before lunch.”

“Then, when I got to my building, they had a bowl with some jolly ranchers, so I took a watermelon and ate it in the Elevator.”

Expectant Pause

At this point I would feel obliged to make conversation, so I would say something like, “Did you end up eating the bagel?”

At which point she would say, “No, not yet, its still in my bag, I don’t know if I’m going to eat it – but I did have three lifesavers as a snack around ten oclock”

Etc.

(inevitable asphyxiation as my brain attempts to crawl out my ear)

Etc.

I had to put a stop to it.

After the Jump: What Happened…

Now here’s the odd thing – I finally broke down and told her that I had absolutely no interest in hearing about what she ate that day, and if she spent another minute telling me, I would probably poke my eye out. You know what? She wasn’t even offended… she was just surprised! She had thought I cared, which is why she kept telling me! When she found how I felt, we were free to talk about other stuff which was much more interesting to the both of us.

I have since found that this is very common. All over the world you’ll find guys who are incredibly bored by this topic, but who don’t complain for fear of reprisal – and girls who talk about it because they figure the guy is interested since he keeps listening. Eventually, the guy gets kind of annoyed and only half listens, and the girl gets annoyed and feels ignored. Either that, or one person’s head explodes. This really happens.

So… if you do this (girl or guy – I don’t mean to be gender specific) think about asking your partner whether they really want to know this kind of information. If you have a significant other who does this – don’t be afraid to politely tell her how much it annoys you.

Life is far too short, and there’s far too many interesting things to talk about, to waste our time on crap no one wants to hear.