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I share food at places where food is meant to be shared: home, picnics, potlucks, the movie theater, in line at the DMV when you have extra mints rolling around in your purse. But I will not share plates at a restaurant. I love a decadent meal, and splitting anything beyond an appetizer will get in the way of that. Physically cutting an entree in half has been historically known to cause distress and discomfort comparable to what those boys were going through during WWI. You think it’s a fun idea to split your entrees, until it arrives and you’re slicing and hacking at it with an IKEA knife so hard against the plate it’s making that EEEEeee sound, and the person you’re with is trying to pretend they’re not fixated on your sad attempts to cut a single enchilada in half which is EEEeee eeEEEE cheese and some fucked up vegetable inside. The regrets are plentiful, unlike the amount of food you’ve both agreed to. And god forbid you’re both eating from one plate. There will inevitably come a time where there’s a tiny bite left, and out of politeness, you and the other person will wait for the other to take it. And it will sit there in SHAME, getting soggy and nasty, and soon, the server will whiz around to clear the table. Not only will you have wished someone ate the last bite before it turned into deflated mush, but you’ll suffer in silence because there’s no good way to point to a single olive and say, “Actually we’re still working on that.” Disaster and internal turmoil because no one could take responsibility over the final loose olive! When you timidly consider ordering more food because you’re still hungry, you won’t do it, because now there’s a precedent that you and this bitch are splitting every item for the rest of your lives, which is what they’re calling 90 minutes of dinner now. Life is complicated enough with its many questions (why aren’t pigeons scared of god, are there more smells out there I should be worried about, what is everyone’s stance on eyebrows right now, should I open a bank, etc). Why add more chaos? Let’s do separate plates.