So I (22F) have been dating my boyfriend (24M) for almost a year, and recently he’s gotten super into cooking. At first it was fun—he’d try new recipes and we'd eat together, laugh about the flops, hype up the wins. But over the past couple months, it’s gotten... weird.

He started calling it his “gastronomic evolution journey” (his words) and now makes dishes that are more like art installations than food. Think: ice cream made with salmon, beet foam on pancakes, spaghetti dyed blue with butterfly pea flower, etc. Okay, fine. A little quirky. I still tried most of it.

But recently, I noticed he started asking really specific questions like, “Did you genuinely enjoy that or were you just being polite?” or “What emotion did this dish make you feel?” Then I caught him taking notes after dinner, like full-on writing in a little notebook. I asked what that was about and he told me he’s been conducting a “micro-social study” on how people respond to unfamiliar foods and “culinary discomfort.”

So basically, I’ve been an unwitting participant in his side project?? He said he wasn’t doing it to me, just with me, and that it’s been “beautiful to watch how trust plays into taste.” I was like, what the hell?

I told him I don’t want to be part of an experiment, and I’m not eating anything he cooks unless he tells me exactly what’s in it and whether it’s normal food or another one of his abstract courses. He got super offended and said I was “limiting his creativity” and “not supporting his passions.”

Now he’s barely talking to me unless it’s about fermentation.

AITAH for drawing a line and refusing to be his culinary guinea pig?