Dating : Week 256: Layers

Sarah often pulls recipes from Tik-Tok. This is a fact with which I have simply had to come to terms. I myself am not a Tik-Tok user. I don’t fully grasp it. But Sarah loves it, and she keeps finding great recipes. That’s a win-win, I’d say!

It was particularly a good thing today. That’s because today, Sarah had one of the best recipes we’ve ever made sitting right there. It was fun. It was simple. And, as the format in which we received it would suggest, it was visually interesting.

This recipe called for a tortilla that you make a radial cut into. You then put cheese in one quadrant, prosciutto in another, and either chicken or a cooked egg in the third (depending on whether this is for breakfast or dinner). The final quadrant is left empty. Then you fold the quadrants over one another and cook in a panini press.

I’m getting dangerously close to just giving you the recipe right here, and that’s not my territory. But it’s part of the story today. You see, Sarah found this recipe. She saw it in her feed, but then she saw it in her creative mind’s eye. She saw what she could do with it. I was simply along for the ride.

It was a wonder to behold. We made a breakfast version on Saturday, then on Sunday we made the lunch version. I honestly can’t tell you which one is better. They are both incredible. The lunch version has ranch dressing on it, so that’s always a plus. But they are both so much fun to make.

Sarah connected with that. She made that connection when she saw someone else share it on TikTok. She saw how she could do it too. And here we were on a Sunday making our own version.

Now, I know that technology is not usually a part of our Cooking With Sarah experiment. We began this journey wanting to unplug and connect. That remains a key aspect. But part of this week’s story is the talent my wife has for connecting. I talked about the connection she made between the original TikTok video and our kitchen already. But now she had another connection to make.

Sarah has been experimenting with Instagram Reels and she decided to make one of our cooking this weekend. I must be honest — when she started, I was a little frustrated at first. She was on her phone and focused on getting the video just right.

But we had been sharing time together all weekend. And if wasn’t so busy being stuck-up with thoughts of how I thought the day should go, we could have been sharing this time too. Because Sarah was creating something. She was communicating. She was making connections.

She posted the Reel, and the connections just kept coming. In fact, to date the video has nearly 18,000 views. It was amazing to see.

I have thoughts about how my day should go. I have an internal monologue that just keeps going. And my mind’s eye sees what it sees. But I’m finding that one of the greatest joys of marriage is the continual process of learning to listen. Learning to see from another perspective. Learning to break away from my internal monologue and try to hear another. I’ll be honest, I’m not very good at this. I can be stubborn and I see things the way I see them.

But Sarah is continually achieving. She’s an incredible person. She’s multi-talented. She’s driven. She cares. And she’s absolutely beautiful. I’d be a fool to have the fortune of being married to her and not listen to the ways she sees the world. Try to do things her way. Break out of my own world.

It’s not about losing myself or my own unique perspective. Sarah never asks me to do that. She supports and enriches me. But that’s just it — if I’m always focused on how I think and the way I do things…then how am I supporting and enriching her?

I’m not on TikTok. But this Sunday, I was sure glad that Sarah is.