Food, which seems to be the answer to all of the world’s troubles, turns out to be more than just something to eat and help our bodies stay alive. Sharing food and feeding each other is a big sign of how close two people are in a relationship.
Paul Rozin and his colleagues at Columbia University say that there are four ways to share food that show how romantic you are with your partner: not sharing, sharing voluntarily, sharing with consubstantiation (when your partner eats food that you have already touched), and feeding.
Rozin and her colleagues had the pairs in the study look at different sharing situations. Then, based on how they felt when they saw the four different ways of sharing, they were asked to rate how close the partners were. For example, you could not let anyone eat your food at all, let someone eat your food on their own, give someone food that you’ve already touched, or put food in your partner’s mouth.
Rozin found that sharing food is a sign of being close with someone. When you first meet someone, if you let them eat off your plate, it shows that you trust them more than you would with a stranger.
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When people share food that has already been touched by someone else, their love judgement goes from 74% to 90%. Lastly, eating is the most obvious sign of closeness between two people and will lead people to think that they are dating.
So, while Tom and Lucy are eating cheese fries together, they might only be thinking about how great cheese fries are. But in fact, they are getting closer and becoming more comfortable with each other. This could lead to a more serious relationship in the future.
When you are in a serious relationship, it becomes natural to share your things with your partner. You share a home, a bed, insurance, and other things. You pretty much do everything together. Once you’re in that situation, it’s hard to remember the first thing you talked about together. Well, in most relationships, sharing food was the first thing that was thought of as something you “shared” with your partner.
Rozin and his colleagues wanted to find out if men and women have different ideas about how close they feel when they share food or are fed.
Comparing men and women, feeding and sharing food has a bigger value for women than for men. This is because feeding may mean more to women than men that they are taking care of someone, while eating may mean more to men than to women that they are in a relationship. The people who took part in the study thought that caring for someone was more important than a simple love act.
To put it more simply, if Lucy and Tom were eating dinner together, Lucy would feel closer to Tom than he would to her. She would feel like she was helping him, which makes her feel closer to Tom. Tom, on the other hand, would just think that sharing food was an easy way to show affection.
So why do people think that sharing food is a sign of closeness in a relationship? Where did this idea even come from? Wulf Schiefenhovel, the head of the Human Ethology Group in Seewiesen, Germany, thinks that the idea of closeness that comes from sharing and feeding food is linked to and passed down through the sharing of food between a parent and a child when they were young.
Wulf says that sharing food is the movement of food without resistance. He talks about how a parent gives food to a child and how that shows why people think that sharing food and feeding each other is a sign of closeness between two people.
The transfer of food from a parent to a child can be easily explained by biology and nature events. Parents care about their children’s well-being because their children carry 50 percent of their own biological genes. The bond between a parent and their child is hard to explain. The fact that you want to feed your kids shows how close you are to them. It is normal to share food with your blood relatives, but studies have shown that if you share food with someone who is not in your bloodline, you think of them as important.
Think about it: when we were babies, one of the most important ways our mothers talked to us without words was by putting food directly into our bodies through breast feeding. This made a real and mental link between us and our mothers. As we get older, the same idea of passing food to a partner shows how close we are to them.
So, when Tom and Lucy are happily married and have kids in 10 years, they probably won’t think about the things they did together in the past. They won’t know it, but the cheese fries they shared at dinner were a big step in how they got to know each other. The cheese fries led to a shared Spotify account, which led to a shared flat, which led to a shared last name.
Rozin and Wulf are not saying that sharing food with your boyfriend or girlfriend means you are taking a big step in your relationship and are going to get married. In both of these studies, it was shown that the simple act of moving food is more like a lot of other things than you might think. Sharing or being fed food is a small but important sign of how close you are to someone.
