This place often seems slanted towards romantic traditionalism and I don't find that traditionalism 100% viable.

I'm a heterosexual male. But I like cleaning and cooking, and I'm not alone, I've seen repeated male threads on the internet about cooking in the past. My love of cooking actually came from grandma who passed away in 2012; when I was a child she would cook for me, or we would make pancakes together and sometimes put food coloring in the batter or in glasses of milk. I've always felt that I would rather cook for a woman than go to a restuarant with her, and foot the entire bill myself in the case of cooking, because it is also a venture towards my own self-improvement and self-actualization. I dropped out of college because they bogged me down with prerequisites and didn't give me the cooking classes I wanted fast enough.

There are at least a growing niche of men who like to cook, and there are a lot of things you can make by learning recipes that are either expensive to buy, far away to buy, or not on market. I have actually quit working on soda syrups, being a less popular form of cooking, due to years of puking bits of blood in conjuction with my love of soda and need to use citric acid to make something that tastes like mainstream soda. So making soda is less interesting with mainstream soda being like a poison when I drink it.

Though the idea of dating has almost been replaced with friends seeing if they're compatible, it really comes down to what's better, a restaurant, or a man who can cook something that tastes good. I want to see as many people get into cooking and baking as possible regardless of gender. But romantic traditionalism aside, a man who can cook and likes it, seems to pay off more in the long term for both parties than "hanging out" (the new term for dating) at a casual dining or fine dining restaurant-- which in all honesty seems increasingly for a group of millennial friends who want to get wasted and eat something good with minimal effort, and for whom cooking, or cooking for each other seems downright weird. Even in a relationship where both people like cooking, its their attitudes that determine whether that becomes a competition or a collaborative effort, and essentially whether that shared interest is something positive.