Caring Is Sharing

Jack Sprat could eat no fat. His wife could eat no lean.And so, between them both you see, they licked the platter clean. Well, that's a little graphic, isn't it? The image sticks with me now, more than when I first heard the rhyme in my youth. Now that I'm married, of course, it sounds like the working model of that whole "opposites attract" ethos that get floated around from time to time. I have also referred, from time to time, to the Pushme-Pullyou nature of human relationships.
The trouble is, to quote John Cleese in one of the funniest episodes of Cheers ever made, this is "the song of the truly desperate." It means that my distaste for kale can't really be made up for by my wife's fondness for this super food. It means that when  my wife says she wants to paint the bathroom blue, I still have to wait and see what shade, or shades, she really has in mind. There is this great big negotiation that takes place every day between people in relationships, and it would be great if there was come arithmetic means to describe these interactions, but it's never that simple.
Unless there was a way to figure out how to share a bag of Hershey's Miniatures. Milk Chocolate, Mister Goodbar, Krackel, and Special Dark. Sure, it would be easy enough to hope that your wife would just sit back and let you peel and eat all those chocolatey treats while she sits back in her chair with a bowl of broccoli slaw all for herself. That's not really going to happen. It wouldn't be right. Nor would sorting out those krispy Krackels and saving them aside for her dessert. They're mostly air. It's probably important to be equitable about how we divvy up the Goodbars, since they have all that peanutty protien. The milk chocolate? Well it is the vanilla, for lack of a better descriptor. In my house, my wife gladly surrenders those because they don't necessarily add to the infinite variety of life. They are just chocolate. It's the Special Dark for which we both pine. It's Special. It says so on the wrapper. If we're trying to love, honor and cherish, how can we keep this property community? True, unconditional love or its literary equivalent might make you think that caring is sharing, and vice versa. That's not always the case. Sometimes you get that whole gift of the Magi thing going on, which leaves the last piece of chocolate sitting on a table while we politely defer to the other. Out loud, at least
Secretly, we wish we could have all the Special Dark. And the Mister Goodbars. And the Milk Chocolate. The Krackel can be saved aside for guests. That's because we care.