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I've been pretending to be bad at cooking for three years so my husband would stop asking me to make dinner, but I'm actually a trained chef who graduated from culinary school before we met.

When Tom and I started dating, I was working as a line cook at a high-end restaurant downtown. The hours were brutal - 12-hour shifts, no weekends, constant pressure. I loved cooking, but the restaurant industry was destroying my personal life.

Tom worked a normal 9-to-5 office job and always talked about wanting a "traditional" relationship where his wife would cook homemade meals every night. He'd go on about how his mom made dinner from scratch daily and how important that was to him.

I was exhausted from working in kitchens all day, so when he'd ask me to cook dinner on my rare nights off, I'd just order takeout and tell him I wasn't good at cooking.

"That's okay, babe," he'd say. "We can learn together someday."

When we moved in together, I made a decision. I told him I'd gone to community college for business and never mentioned culinary school. I got a job doing administrative work at a law firm - regular hours, weekends free, way less stress.

But Tom still expected home-cooked meals.

The first time he asked me to make dinner in our new apartment, I panicked. I couldn't just magically become a good cook overnight without him getting suspicious about my background.

So I burned the chicken. On purpose.

"It's harder than it looks," I said, scraping charred pieces into the trash.

Tom was sweet about it. "Don't worry, cooking takes practice. Maybe we should start with something simpler."

That's how it started. For three years, I've been deliberately ruining perfectly good food to maintain the illusion that I can't cook.

I've burned steaks, oversalted pasta, made lumpy mashed potatoes, and once "accidentally" used salt instead of sugar in cookies. Each disaster just reinforced Tom's belief that I needed his help in the kitchen.

The irony is that Tom is actually terrible at cooking. He makes basic things like grilled cheese and scrambled eggs, but he acts like he's teaching me advanced techniques.

"See, honey, you want to flip the pancake when you see bubbles forming," he'll explain while I mentally critique his technique and timing.

I've bitten my tongue watching him make mistakes I could fix in seconds. Wrong pan temperatures, poor knife skills, no understanding of seasoning. But I nod and pretend to learn.

The worst part is that I miss cooking. I'll sneak into the kitchen early in the morning sometimes and make myself a perfect omelet or hollandaise sauce, then clean up all evidence before Tom wakes up.

Last month, Tom surprised me by signing us up for couples cooking classes.

"I thought it would be fun to learn together," he said excitedly. "The instructor is supposed to be really good."

I spent the entire first class pretending to struggle with basic knife cuts while the instructor - who was actually one of my former culinary school classmates - kept giving me confused looks.

"You have really good instincts," Chef Williams said after watching me "accidentally" achieve perfect brunoise cuts. "Have you cooked before?"

"Just following your instructions," I said, deliberately making my next cuts uneven.

Tom beamed with pride. "She's a natural! I told you she just needed proper teaching."

The cooking classes have been torture. I have to watch Tom take credit for "teaching" me things while I pretend to struggle with techniques I mastered years ago.

But here's the thing - I'm trapped now. If I suddenly become good at cooking, Tom will ask questions. If I admit the truth, he'll want to know why I lied for three years about something so fundamental.

Sometimes I fantasize about just making him the perfect beef wellington or coq au vin and watching his jaw drop. But then what? How do I explain that I've been sabotaging dinner for three years?

I've created a prison where I have to be bad at the thing I love most just to avoid an awkward conversation about why I lied in the first place.