In our house we like to cook and we like to eat. Okay we don’t always like to cook, but we enjoy good food and we’re not trust-funders which means we can’t eat out 21 meals a week.

So we cook. (And by “we” I do not mean “I”. Joe is a badass cook, too.) We have every chef’s tool ever invented, but man do we love our knives.

True story: When we got married thirteen years ago, we registered for knives. Not a set of them, mind you. Each, individual knife. When my mom asked which item on our registry I wanted most, I salivated as I described the specific high carbon, precision-forged chef’s knife of my dreams.

“That knife costs a hundred and seventy-five dollars,” my mom said.

“I know,” I told her. “It’s a really great knife.”

“But you can get a whole knife block for that much money,” she insisted.

“I don’t want fifteen decent knives,” I tried to explain. “I want one amazing one.”

She literally couldn’t do it–she couldn’t buy a single mind-blowing knife knowing that she could have a shit-ton of mediocre knives for the same price. So she sent me a gift card to the store and I bought the knife myself. We use that knife daily, fight over it frequently, and never once have I regretted the splurge.

With that in mind, I recently bought us Joe a new set of steak knives because I wanted them for his birthday. They rival any fancy steakhouse’s finest blades and, let me point out, they were not inexpensive.

“What are you doing?” I asked Joe one day shortly after the purchase, noticing he was unsetting the table I had just set.

“I’m just putting the good knives back and getting the old ones out,” he said. “I want to save the good ones.”

“For what?” I demanded.

“For company,” he said.

My husband is the world’s most gracious host and I love that about him, I really do. I also wanted to use my his fucking knives.

Here’s the thing: My grandparents spent forty years sitting day in and day out on couches covered in plastic. They took the plastic off only when we came over, which wasn’t that often. When they died–in their 90s each–those ugly-ass gold brocade couches looked brand-spanking new. It was the saddest thing I ever saw in my life.

Last night, Joe made massive, mouth-watering T-bones. I asked the girls to set the table. After they were done, I noticed Joe replacing the knives they’d chosen. With the good ones. He did look a little anxious every time he heard my knife make contact with my plate (I was dulling the blade, damn it!), but I pretended not to notice. When I die, I want those blades to be rusty, dull and gnarled beyond recognition.