When Phillip Stallone asked his future father-in-law for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he faced an important question.

“Do you have any debt?” he was asked.

Stallone, 29 at the time, confessed to carrying a gasoline credit card and a house account at Bissinger’s, a gourmet chocolatier. It was an unusual answer, but Stallone’s appreciation for fine chocolates started young.

As a young boy, his father used to take him along when he visited a car dealership in St. Louis’ Central West End. Bissinger’s was across the street, and his dad would drop him off there while he chatted with the dealer about old cars. It was the only Rolls Royce dealer in the state, Stallone remembers.

Stallone would tell the sales clerks in the shop that he was just hanging out, waiting for his dad, and they would offer him a free sample from their bowl.

“What do you think?” they would ask.

It was the best chocolate he’d ever tasted. It was a smart strategy: Exposing a young child to the finer things in life is a good way to create an expensive lifelong habit. Stallone never forgot the taste of those treats.

Years later, when he was a teenager and had his first job, he went back to buy a sample pack as a gift for his mother. The box cost more than he was making at the time. The store clerk said he could come back and pay for it on Saturday -- payday.

The glory of a house account was realized that day.

There was something great about being able to walk into a chocolate shop, indulge in gourmet dark chocolate and say, “Just put it on my account,” he said. (Recently, a store clerk asked him if it was possible to just pay with a credit card.)

He worked at Stallone’s Formal Wear, which had been established by his grandfather in 1899. There was a dry cleaner next door, and a young woman stopped by to visit her friends who worked there. They struck up a friendship over the years, and he took her to his favorite chocolate shop during their courtship.

“When you are eating a box of chocolate with someone you dearly love, it makes a difference,” he said.

There’s a scientific explanation why this melt-in-your-mouth treat feels so good. Eating chocolate releases a host of delightful neurotransmitters. First, there’s the caffeine that causes a quickening of the heart rate. There is also another stimulant, theobromine, in chocolate. Then, add a bit of serotonin, a natural mood-lifter, which the body makes from the amino acid tryptophan. Chocolate contains both serotonin and tryptophan. You can also find anandamide in the fat in chocolate, which activates a receptor that causes dopamine production.

With this rush of feel-good chemicals flooding our system, it only makes sense that romantic love would be intensified. And Stallone loved giving good chocolate as much as eating it. Once he gave his 6-year-old niece an 11-pound chocolate bunny for Easter.

“Her mother and father were about ready to skin me alive,” he laughed. “But talk about a head-turner.”

In the late ‘80s, he bought his wife a three-pound box of chocolate for Valentine’s Day. He brings the original heart box into Bissinger’s every year, where they refill it and write the date on the back. One year he nearly forgot, until a store clerk left a message saying she needed his heart. His secretary was a little concerned by the note.

“She thought I had a medical problem,” he said. But he raced down to the shop the morning of Feb. 13 and watched while they filled his heart box on the spot.

He had a hunch his wife would share his love of sweets, based on her father’s reaction to his debt “confession” many years ago. His future father-in-law hugged him and gave them his blessing.

Stallone married Candace Dower 42 years ago this July.

He calls her Candy.

I deliberately tried to draw attention to what I was about to say.

“I have been thinking about something,” I announced.

Dramatic pause.

“And, after thinking and reading about it for a long time, I’ve come to a decision,” I said. My husband perked up and seemed interested in what was about to go down.

“Yes?” he said, putting aside whatever he was doing in the kitchen.

“I want us to only bring humanely raised meat into the house,” I said. I explained that we should know the source of any meat that we buy, and that I don’t want to eat chickens that have been raised in crowded cages, or beef from factory-farmed cows. I’m pretty sure most of the meat we cook with is of higher quality than that, anyway, but we still get deli meat for school lunches, and cans of chicken noodle soup from chicken of unknown origin. It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to buy meat that has been ethically raised by workers who were treated fairly.

My husband seemed to lose interest in my big announcement once he realized it was about groceries, but he nodded in general agreement. That was easy, I thought. I had expected more resistance, since my husband is wary of pronouncements that increase our grocery bill.

The next day, he brought home lunch meat purchased from the local grocery store’s deli counter. I was irritated, but let it slide. Maybe there needs to be an adjustment period, I thought. Two days later, he brought home dinner from another grocery’s hot deli bar, including barbecued chicken of undetermined provenance. This time, my irritation was aggravated by hunger and my inability to eat the chicken due to my previously stated ethical boundary. So I just yelled something about my values not being respected and stomped upstairs.

Perhaps this was not the most mature approach, but hangry is a dangerous mood.

I’m pretty sure something was yelled in return about the confusion and hypocrisy of said values, since I was still willing to eat meat at nice restaurants.

Thus commenced the Cold War of 2018. Long-term couples know of what I speak. It’s when you’re too mad to rationally discuss the issue at hand, yet too tired to get into an argument, so you reduce your spoken exchanges to transactional conversations about kids and household logistics. It is an immature way to try to settle a disagreement, but these things can happen when you’ve been married for a long time.

After a few days, the Cold War fizzled out because we are too old to have the energy to sustain it. But it did give me time to think about what was at the core of my feelings about this issue. Ostensibly, it was about respect. But what was it really about?

Like I said, most of the meat purchased for the house is up to ethical standards, so why did I lose it over sandwiches and takeout? This might have something to do with it: In the past year, several close friends have been struck with life-changing diagnoses. These are healthy people living active lives, randomly hit with cancer and other serious illnesses. It’s a scary, close-to-home reminder of how much is out of our control. And our modern commercial food-manufacturing system makes it difficult to know what is truly healthy to put in our bodies and feed our children.

My newfound focus on meat “origin stories” had something to do with my anxiety about keeping everyone healthy. From my husband’s perspective, the fight was really about personal autonomy and not being forced to follow an edict without discussion about all the gray areas. Like, is it OK to bring home takeout from a restaurant we both enjoy, even if we aren’t sure of how they source the meat?

A week later, once we each had time to simmer down, we talked (at times loudly) about the contrasting research we had read on meat suppliers and standards at various grocery chains.

My friends who have been committed to clean, ethical eating for far longer advised me that the best solution was simply to eat less meat. My 12-year-old son, who witnessed all stages of the feud, finally weighed in: “This argument is so dumb.”

Yes, the initial stomping and yelling and subsequent silent treatment was dumb. But the argument was useful. It made us do more research, be more intentional about our grocery choices and talk more deeply about issues that matter to us.

I just have to figure out the best way to unveil Meatless Mondays.

Parents try to teach their children to use their words. It’s an important life skill to be able to identify emotions -- and, as we get older, to articulate complex ideas.

Here’s a chance for parents to use our own words. Two political candidates in Missouri recently handed us a perfect opportunity.

First, there’s Jeanie Ames, a Missouri woman running for the school board in a suburban St. Louis district. Screenshots of her Twitter feed, which she has since made private, were posted on a photo-sharing site and reported by the local media. She referred to Michelle Obama as “a giant rat.” She tweeted that the Black Caucus is what is wrong with America and that Puerto Rico is “one trailer park payment away from being homeless.” She also called for a ban on Islam in America and for another “crusade.”

Decent people are horrified and disgusted by her beliefs, but we can’t afford to look away from the ugliest parts of our communities. We have to expose the ugliness for what it is, especially when it’s coming from a person running for a seat on a school board. And it’s important that we show these harsh realities to our children; they should be just as aware of who wants to control their schools as we are.

Children should know exactly what it is to call for banning an entire religion. It’s called bigotry.

Supporting a “crusade” to rid America of an entire religious group? That’s what the Nazis attempted when they murdered 6 million Jews.

In her online bio, Ames calls herself a “Confederate.” The Confederates fought to preserve slavery in the South. Ames tried to describe these views as “politically conservative.”

That’s an insult to political conservatives. These tweets are racist.

Remember, even David Duke doesn’t call himself a racist. Nowadays, white supremacists want to be called “alt-right” or “white nationalists.” Instead, we need to call these beliefs what they are.

This may lead to another discussion of why some people feel comfortable sharing hate-filled views on social media. It’s likely because they have created a supportive audience of like-minded people, and those who disagree don’t want anything to do with them. When the rest of us are silently disgusted, these views become normalized. If our children don’t hear us loudly condemning bigotry, they’ll think it’s a common way to think. If they don’t hear us calling such remarks what they are, they’ll have a distorted view of what “politically conservative” means.

But let’s not stop there. We’ve also got Courtland Sykes, a Missouri Republican running for U.S. Senate. Sykes is making national headlines for reposting his position on women’s rights, as reinforced to his fiancee: “I want to come home to a home-cooked dinner at 6 every night, one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives.”

He also states his goals for his future daughters: “I don’t want them to grow up into career-obsessed banshees who forgo home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting, manophobic, hell-bent feminist she-devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings they are (sic) think they could have leaped over in a single bound -- had men not ‘suppressing them’ (sic).“

The best advice to give our daughters is: If they encounter a man with views like this, run in the opposite direction. These are outdated, misogynistic ideas of what women should or should not be. Women are just as worthy of having a career and a family as men are.

Here’s a chance to explain the power and abuse of social media. Parents should say Ames’ tweets were racist and Sykes’ post is sexist, and be able to explain why to their children.

Let’s make a social media example out of these two.

And, for those in other parts of the country sneering at the ignorant, backwards candidates we’ve got running in our state -- don’t think for a minute these people aren’t in your communities, too. The last election proved that millions of Americans are willing to overlook candidates’ comments that vilify and denigrate racial and ethnic minorities and insult women.

So talk about these social media posts with your children. Call them what they are, and ask your kids to do better than we have been.

Use your words.