One of my good friends has been patiently trying to teach her untaught but overconfident husband how to cook normal dishes that an actual human person would eat. Her mother-in-law was proud of the fact that no man who has lived in her household has ever learned to cook or do laundry, but unfortunately her attempts to sabotage her son to be too functionally helpless to ever abandon her ultimately failed.
She's still trying to annoy both of them to death but my friend has plenty of combat experience with putting up with infuriating family of her own, so her mother-in-law is powerless to do anything but screech and whine about how this Evil Woman Stole Her Son. And is Making Him learn to do laundry.
Okay in defense of this guy, I'm gonna share a little anecdote. A few weeks ago me and a bunch of my friends went to this cabin for a weekend together, and this friend's husband was lured out there by the promise of ice fishing. He's a wilderness enthusiast, you can pretty much just let him loose and he'll hunt his own food. Anyway since it was winter and there's a sauna by the lake, someone also brought up that we should do some ice swimming as well.
So as we're settling in, this guy grabs his fishing gear and lets us know that he'll also be on the lookout for a good spot for the swimming hole. The host - and the rest of us - figures that he just means to find a good spot and then come back to ask for the tools to make the hole. There's a chainsaw in the shed that'll do just fine.
Instead, once he gets back to the cabin, it's already dark. He's not soaking wet or frozen all the way through, but very well frosted. Icicles hanging from his beard and moustache, water droplets frozen all around his clothes. Those who have seen the movie Frozen, if you're picturing the scene of Kristoff first entering the trading post, that's almost frosty enough. Those of you who know about the death of Grigori Rasputin, if you can picture what his frozen corpse must have looked like when he was just pulled out of the river, that's slightly too frosty. Picture a hypothetical third guy who dove in to drag Rasputin's corpse out of the waters.
But he wasn't injured or anything, he was alive and well and seemed very satisfied with whatever the hell he'd been doing, which he immediately let us know: He has made us a swimming hole. With an axe. A handheld axe that had happened to be the most convenient tool he'd had nearby. He had spent most of the time he'd been gone (which nobody had been worried about because he is, as mentioned before, very much at home in the wild out there) hacking a hole through the ice - ice thick enough that you could've driven a car on it - with an axe. It had not crossed his mind to come back inside to ask what tools anyone else thought he should use.
We took turns going to the sauna and the ice hole, of course, to make sure that just in case something happens there's always enough people around for rescue. I didn't go the first day, but on the second day I was in the sauna in a group of four including me, another friend who had gone ice swimming a few times before, and this friend and the guy who is her husband. The day before had been her first time ice swimming in a real natural lake, and as the last one I turned to him and didn't even ask, I just supposed out loud that he has surely been doing this stuff for a good long while.
Nah. The day before had been his first time also.
So, in conclusion, this isn't a guy who'll use "I've never done that before" as an excuse to not learn something. Just because he was never taught to do something doesn't mean he's not going to try, and he'll bring that attitude to housework also. He's not scared of being let loose in unfamiliar environments and the kitchen is one of them.
And the ice was kinda thick
