Forget love languages. Forget attachment styles. Forget whatever the latest pop-psychology framework says about whether you're a "secure base" or a "protest behavior." The real test of whether you can coexist with another human being is this:
How do you grocery shop together?
I'm serious. If you want to know whether a relationship — romantic, platonic, whatever — is going to survive the long haul, skip the couples retreat and go to Trader Joe's on a Sunday.
There are fundamentally three types of grocery shoppers, and they are as follows:
The List Person. Has a list. Follows the list. The list is organized by aisle. Deviations from the list are treated with the same gravity as deviations from a flight plan. If you put something in the cart that's not on the list, The List Person will look at it, look at you, and then look at the item again as though it has personally insulted them.
The Wanderer. Does not have a list. Does not want a list. Believes that grocery shopping is an "intuitive experience" and that you should "let the produce speak to you." Will spend eleven minutes choosing between two identical bunches of cilantro. Leaves the store with stuff for three meals, none of which go together.
The Speed Runner. In and out. Cart moving at all times. No browsing. No comparing. Grabs whatever brand is at eye level and moves on. Could complete a weekly shop in the time it takes The Wanderer to decide on yogurt.
Now, here's the thing. Any one of these types can live a perfectly happy life. The problems start when you put two different types in the same grocery store with one shared cart.
"Do we need this?"
"Do we need anything? We need air. We need water. We need to stop pretending that 'need' is a useful framework for peanut butter purchasing decisions."
I've been in every possible combination. I have pushed a cart behind a Wanderer while being a Speed Runner and felt my soul leave my body in the cereal aisle. I have been a Wanderer next to a List Person and felt judged by someone holding a spreadsheet. I have tried to be a List Person and gave up by aisle three because I wrote "snacks" as a line item and that is not, apparently, specific enough.
The point isn't that one way is right. The point is that every cohabitation situation is essentially a negotiation between people who approach the basics of life — food, space, time, the correct way to load a dishwasher — with completely different operating systems.
And that's before you add feelings.
My current living situation involves all three types under one roof. We've tried shared grocery runs. We've tried dividing it up. We've tried one of those meal kit services, which lasted two weeks before we collectively decided that following instructions for a meal we could've just made without the instructions was a special kind of punishment.
Now, we each buy our own groceries and share the results like a potluck that no one organized. Tuesday night, you open the fridge and it's someone else's leftover pad thai, your string cheese, and a container of something that could be soup or could be smoothie and no one is confident enough to ask.
It works. Somehow. Like everything else around here, it works not because anyone planned it, but because we all decided to stop fighting the entropy and just eat the pad thai.