Symbiosis is not Co-dependency

I do the dishes in our house and the pianist does the cooking. This is highly satisfactory to both parties with few exceptions. The reason symbiosis is not co-dependancy is the presence of " intelligent design", if you'll pardon a borrowed phrase. The pianist is a good cook, as her mother was. I take pride in a pristine kitchen at the end of it all. Clean counters,a place for everything and everything in its place. You should be able to put your hand on anything in the kitchen in the dark. I don't mean to be insufferable. It's just that if I have a role in retirement, then I have a right to an opinion. She crashes on the couch and watches CBC Newsworld after dinner. My one complaint, always ignored, is that the pianist invariably leaves food on her plate, no matter how much, or how little she initially took. Even this morning, the one piece of toast she ate had a tiny bit of crust measuring 8 millimeters in diameter. I ,without a word of a lie, have to scrape her plate content into the garbage every day. Garburators are an unknown quantity on Lotus Island. I cannot understand the critical threshold of an appetite that is so finely tuned that couldn't cope with such. She states that her family taught, that to eat everything on the plate implied that you were "greedy". I was taught in my family to eat everything, because the poor starving people from elsewhere in the world would be sorrowful to see such waste. The upshot of this is, I always have to go to the the garbage first with her plate to scrape, whereas my " clean plater" approach is one move less. I can't emotionally put dirty dishes in the dishwasher. I have to wash them first! Don't ask me why? Probably blame the operating equipment room mentality. This precedent setting kitchen activity has transmogrified to many other aspects of our shared existence. It's symbiotic when in a pinch, the roles can be reversed seamlessly without a disaster of any magnitude. That's the fall back position in retirement. You can still cheerfully be"a Jack of all trades and a master of none." The price of always licking your plate clean is tight trousers. I wish we had a dog again!