I've eaten alone in some of the best places in the world. A bowl of pho on a tiny plastic stool in Hanoi at 6 AM, a mystery meat skewer on a dark street in Marrakech. Solo eating is one of travel's great pleasures because you're following your own hunger and nobody else's. But apparently a lot of couples are now doing this at home, and it has a name: food divorce.

It's pretty much what it sounds like. Couples who live together, maybe even sleep in the same bed, are shopping separately, cooking their own meals, eating at different times. Sometimes in different rooms.

And before you picture two people angrily microwaving Lean Cuisines on opposite sides of the kitchen, a lot of this is just practical. GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy have changed how millions of people experience hunger and fullness. If one partner is on a medication that makes them barely want dinner and the other comes home starving at 7:30, forcing a shared plate of pasta becomes this weird negotiation nobody signed up for.

Then there are the schedules. Remote and hybrid work mean people are grazing all day instead of sitting down for a proper lunch. One person's fasting until noon, the other is eating breakfast at their desk at 6 AM. By dinner, you've already had entirely different food days. Throw in a vegan girlfriend, a keto husband, someone doing Whole30 for the third time this year, and the shared grocery list starts looking like a group project nobody wants to manage.

I get it. I once traveled with someone for three weeks in Vietnam where I wanted to eat bun cha at every street stall I could find and he had decided, two days before the trip, that he was going to be vegetarian. We made it work but there were nights I sat on a sidewalk eating something incredible while he had white rice and a sad papaya salad across town. We loved each other. Our stomachs just had different plans.

Food divorce doesn't have to be sad, though. Some couples say cooking their own meals gives them back a sense of autonomy. They can eat what they want, when they want, without compromise or resentment bubbling up over whose turn it is to choose the restaurant. The nightly "what do you want for dinner" spiral is genuinely one of the most exhausting rituals in modern relationships.

I mean, it stings a little. The shared meal is one of the oldest ways humans connect. Some of my favorite memories from the road aren't the food itself but who I was eating it with, passing plates around, arguing about what the best dish was. Every culture builds its gatherings around a table.

So if you're food divorced, I'm not judging. Sometimes you just need to eat your weird snack dinner in peace. But maybe once a week, find one thing you both want and sit down together for it. It doesn't have to be fancy. Some of the best meals I've ever had were just rice and whatever was in the fridge, eaten cross-legged on a living room floor with someone I loved.