One silver lining of having an apartment so small you can feel your stomach brush the wall with a particularly strong exhale is that you don’t have to feel bad not helping whomever is cooking dinner or doing the dishes. Fitting two people into the foot-and-a-half wide corridor that houses our fridge, oven, microwave, and sink is simply a non-starter. It’s frustrating at times, but it has helped instill a natural division of labor — whoever cooks does not touch the dishes — that I don’t think would have occurred otherwise, and it muted the well-intentioned, but not always constructive, instinct to help a busy cook who’s in the zone and doesn’t want to be bothered with finding you a vegetable to peel or something.
