None of this seems to apply if you don't have children. I've never had this kind of stressful meal (on a recurring basis) with friends, housemates, colleagues,

None of this seems to apply if you don't have children. I've never had this kind of stressful meal (on a recurring basis) with friends, housemates, colleagues, conference friends, customers or other work people, or significant others. Sure, maybe one-off unpleasant conversation or something ("we need to discuss the production outage which affected our site last week"), but not on a repeated basis. Whether you cook from scratch, make some kind of prepared food or leftovers, have take-out/delivery, or go out to eat seems irrelevant by comparison.