In an age when some folks would rather “marry” an AI, I’m closing in on four years with my real-life partner: learning, growing, and trying to be mindful of how differently the world works from her point of view. That is, until she casually revealed her fucked up high-society Oreo-consuming routine, and I had to drop all “wife guy” pretences and call her a weirdo.
For starters, my partner doesn’t eat normal Oreos, Double Stuf, More Stuf, or any of the other flavors that would make sense to have a preference for. No, she eats the lemon creme-flavored Oreo Thins. That's fine; whatever rocks your boat. In all seriousness, she explained it to me as a part of her AuDHD where, to her, the OG Oreo cookie tastes like “dirt, sand, and dry.” It could be worse; she could be the type of person I was in college, who would eat Oreos with soda instead of milk—a choice I’m paying for with my recent dentist visit. What’s got me cross isn’t the why, but the how of my partner’s Oreo eating habit. Here’s documentation of my partner's Oreo eating ritual:
Step One: Twisting the cookie in half
The least surprising part of my partner’s demonstration, which I immediately felt compelled to document because of its next step, involves her splitting the cookie in two. While doing so, she revealed that this step’s success rate, contrary to my reservations about its narrow margin for error, exponentially improves with the thin version of the cookie, as opposed to the original or Double Stuf options, due to the ratio of creme to cookie wafer.
“I do my best to evenly get all of the creme on one side and have an empty shell on the other,” she said, noticing how my face scrunched up when she referred to the halves of the cookies as “shells.”
Step 2: Fancy feasting
The next step in my partner’s process involves, as she puts it, “using the empty one like a little chip, dipping into the lemon creme.” However, that’s only one of the methods she uses. While this is her all but putting her pinky up and scraping creme off the cookie like it was a makeshift charcuterie board, method two sees her strip-mining the creme cookie chip until it's barren, using her teeth to make marks on it until all of the “stuf” is gone, and then eating the cookies straight out.
But why?
My partner doesn't know when her Oreo-eating ritual started. But she remembers eating them this way as a child, after getting the ick from eating them the pedestrian way. That includes a disdain for the dipping-in-milk process because she dislikes both when the Oreo gets soggy and when its crumbs sink to the bottom of the cup, i.e., the whole point of why folks do that.
“When they would always bring the Oreos out for all of us, all my cousins or whoever else would dip them in milk and eat them the regular way. I never liked that,” she said. “I thought the cookie was too thick. I thought it tasted like dirt.”
Why lemon-flavored Oreos? Well, she says she randomly saw them in the grocery store and realized they were better suited for her than the mainstream option. They had the right flavor profile and the perfect balance of cookie and creme to add to the thrill of “peeling it off perfectly.”
“It’s the perfect amount of cookie, the perfect amount of lemon creme. It’s not too much of either. These are my favorites,” she said.
Despite my teasing, her response to why she eats Oreos the way she does is beautiful.
“It's just a part of who I am,” she said after finishing off her cookie. “I've never really questioned it, I never thought it was weird, it’s just something I do.”
In writing this, her Oreo revelation doesn’t come as a surprise, considering the first time we went grocery shopping together. She sincerely asked me what I used my vanilla almond milk for, and was taken aback by my response, “To drink.” And yet, despite knowing some of her other quirks—like the time I watched in silent outrage as she scraped the frosting off her cake and lobbed it straight into the trash—I wasn’t fully prepared for her lore drop show-and-tell. At least now we’ve established a system: she gets her Oreos, and any rejected frosting is referred to me instead of being thrown away. Everyone wins.
