The other day I sent my wife a link to a new set of ceramic pans and asked, “What do you think?” assuming she’d be as impressed as I was of the picture of eggs sliding off the pan. Her response: a grimace. Using my sixteen years of husbandly intuition, I surmised that we were not on the same page about kitchenware.

For context, my wife has had the same stainless steel pans that her parents bought her since we met. They’ve outlasted the fancier non-stick pans we’ve auditioned. Her opinion of the pans is that they’re high-quality because they’ve lasted so long and still work. And from that perspective she’s right, they technically still work… but not without some downsides.

When you use stainless steel pans instead of non-stick pans, you’re committing to stickiness and having a harder time cleaning your pans. I can accept that as an incurred cost. I think my bigger issue is that ALL our pans do this. Even our cast irons which we’ve made thousands of batches of bacon with but still aren’t seasoned. If you make scrambled eggs, about two eggs worth of material forms a brown sheet of crust on the bottom of the pan that I must scrape off but NOT using soap per the laws of properly seasoning a cast iron pan.

Anyways, my wife and I aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the pans and I’m kind of struggling to see why. I think there’s some frugalness afoot and possibly some sentimental attachment to items that were gifts. And then she –with her Deanna Troi, betazoid-levels of empathy– said “You probably think we need new ones because you do the dishes” and that was our ah-ha moment!

In our house I’m the self-appointed dish-master because I can hyperfocus on them while listening to an audiobook, pairing something I don’t like with something I do like. My perspective on the pans is that they’re a lot of work to clean up every night. Scraping and scrubbing the charred chunky bits off so we can ruin them the next day. Essentially, I operate at a different end of the “stack” of dishes than she does so we see the situation differently. I have bigger feelings about the stickiness of the pans because that’s the part that I interface with the most. I would like to apply non-stick technology to improve the dish-washing process. Where she sees something that works okay and we’ve had for a long time, while I see a maintenance burden.

Now we have an end-to-end/cross-team perspective of our pans and that is valuable. We understand each other’s needs on a micro-level (the pans are too sticky) and the macro-level (one side of the stack inherits more burden with our pan choice) and that’s helpful for framing future conversations about pans. That said, I don’t think we’re getting new pans any time soon. Such is life. Not all decisions are technical ones.