My wife and are recently married and we didn’t live together before we got married. I did stay at her house a lot before marriage and I always had frustrations with food because I would constantly have to come to her house and buy food because she cannot grocery shop. She’s very picky when it comes to food. Since we moved in together we’ve been doing a joint account with grocery’s and we usually add things through the week and pick up the food items we want. I eat way more than she does so a lot of the items are items I like to eat including snacks and quick options for lunches for work. Today, she was upset and spent probably an hour crying because we got groceries and she felt like she had nothing to eat. I told her that I thought she added things on the order and that there are a lot of options. She didn’t feel like there was so I asked her what would she like to do? Let’s pick items she can make and enjoy throughout the week for lunch. She told me she doesn’t know and her brain can’t come up with meal options like that. She would rather us sit down and come up with meal ideas together which often include elaborate ingredients that cost a lot of money and we often never use the ingredients again. She also can’t eat something more than 2-3 times a week. So, we’d have to come up with lunch and dinner options each day for no more than 2-3 times a week with elaborate recipes.
I’m completely at a loss because not only do I not want to do that but it seems completely unrealistic. We’d be meal prepping at least two times a week to cover that and the cost plus waste would be crazy. I genuinely don’t know how to get on the same page with my wife on the subject of food. It’s also hard to sit there while she’s crying over not having anything to eat but there’s more than enough food to eat in our house. Example we have rice, noodles, soups (she eats soups not me so there all soups she likes), frozen chicken, sandwhich meat, breakfast items, fresh fruit, we had veggies but we had to throw some out because it was brown, crackers, peanut butter, nuts, snack bars, cottage cheese, Greek yogurt and a few other things. What makes it worse is when I ask what she would like, she doesn’t know.
Tl;dr I don’t know how to purchase and prepare food for her and neither does she. We can’t make multiple elaborate meals throughout the week because our schedules don’t allow for it plus purchasing ingredients would increase the already high cost of groceries. I don’t know what to do.