The Spaghetti Level of Dating

I placed the bowl of spaghetti on the table directly in front of my husband. Then I stood there for a moment and gave him a dirty look, just like I do every time I make spaghetti.

“So,” I said in a completely serious tone, “is this magic bowl of spaghetti sending you a message? Because if the pasta is trying to tell you something, I think we need to clear it up right now before I bring the meatballs out.” And then I waited.

“I’d rather not talk about it,” he usually says, which is the right ­answer.

I’m sure not everyone eats spaghetti like this, but it’s become something of a custom in our house. The gravy is homemade; the meatballs are the result of generations of meat and cheese mashing until they are perfect. I’m a pro at making gravy now, but when I was in my 20s it wasn’t such an easy task. Although I’d been watching my Nana make gravy since I was old enough to know that hot oil will pop into your eye if you stand too close to frying spheres of meat, it took a certain amount of chutzpah to take on the duty myself. One afternoon, I decided to give it a shot and followed my Nana’s directions for Sunday gravy, mapped out in her formal script on a stained recipe card.

I rolled the meatballs out perfectly, a precise combination of beef, pork, breadcrumbs, garlic, and Parmesan. My Nana’s recipe. Fried to a crispy, deep brown, I plopped them into the gravy, which had been waiting patiently in a pot next to the frying pan.

From the aroma steaming up from the popping bubbles in the simmering sauce, I could tell it was going to be awesome. This was my family’s age-old mainstay tomato sauce for all things Italian: lasagna, eggplant parm, and, most important, macaroni. My Nana’s gravy acumen left a lot to live up to. It takes hours to make, and the longer it simmers, the better it is. I left my gravy on all morning, and thought that as long as I was going through the trouble for my own dinner, I might as well spread the glory of gravy around and put together a nice lunch for a guy I had just started dating. Instead of eating off the roach coach, he would have an awesome dish of spaghetti and meatballs.

When the gravy was finished, I assembled the spaghetti and meatballs together in a Tupperware bowl and brought it to his place of employment, eager to deliver such a delicious lunch. He smiled when he took it, and said he would call me later that night. I waited in wild anticipation of what he would say. Italian girls have a lot to make up for; if you’re not willing to have hot wax poured over 90 percent of your body, you’d better be exceptional in other areas. I was hoping gravy would be mine.

And he did call when he said he would, then invited me over. He made no mention of the spaghetti, but as soon as I got to his house, his reaction couldn’t have been more spectacular.

He broke up with me. I tried to take it on the chin, but I sobbed to Stevie Nicks songs the whole way home, wailing like a cat. He said he wasn’t ready for something so serious, not even when I insisted that macaroni was just macaroni and not an offering of a dowry. It was not a cow or a herd of goats. It was just lunch.

I’m sorry, he said. I’m not ready for the spaghetti level of relationship, he explained. Spaghetti added a lot of pressure. It was too soon; spaghetti was … more than he could do at the moment. Spaghetti was heavy.

I was stunned for days. Would it have been different with macaroni and cheese? Should I have delivered a burrito?

After overthinking my misstep too much, I started to resent the spaghetti. I was never going to make it again.

I told my Nana what had happened, and she just laughed. “What a gavone,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Spaghetti is just spaghetti! Now, if you made gnocchi or braciole, that’s asking for a commitment.”

I ran into him at my favorite bar that weekend, and instead of snubbing him, I addressed the issue ­head-on.

“Hey, you,” I said, wagging a drunk finger in his face. “That gravy wasn’t just for you, you know. I was trying to be nice. Try to find another girl who makes it like I do. Never. Gonna. Happen. That’s my Nana’s gravy, buster. And you’ve had it for the last time.”

“It was delicious,” he admitted.

Twenty years later, I still think of that guy when I make gravy. I’ve gotten better at it, and now, after two decades of practice, I have it nearly down to perfection. I feel almost sorry for him, but then I remember the snot bubble I blew near the freeway exit to my house 20 years ago and I just have to laugh at his foolishness. Jerk.

And when I ask my husband if he sees anything in the magic spaghetti, he never has an answer. But he eats every last bite.

 

Laurie Notaro is the author of the novels Crossing the Horizon, Spooky Little Girl, and There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell, as well as essay collections and numerous works of nonfiction, including The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life.

From the book HOUSEBROKEN: Admissions of an Untidy Life by Laurie Notaro. Copyright © 2016 by Laurie Notaro. Published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

This article is featured in the January/February 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.