You Are Not Alone- It Has A Name

My husband is a machosexual. There I’ve said it and I’m not ashamed to admit it. No, I didn’t mean metrosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. As “bootylicious” is attributed to Beyonce, I think that the term machosexual will be forever synonymous with my husband. I know that there are myriad expressions to describe how people look and act and that it is easy to get confused. Nevertheless, I am still going to throw machosexual into the mix. I can’t take all or even most of the credit for the creation of this new moniker. That honor goes to the wedding planner for our big day.

A machosexual, we determined, is a man who, although seemingly very manly and rugged on the outside, clearly knows a bit more than one would assume about traditional “girly” endeavors, such as wedding planning. Let me explain how we arrived at this title for my husband and for those other men out there whose wives have yet to find an appropriate description for them.

My husband is about as much of a man’s man as you can get, on the outside. He played football in college and rugby afterwards. Let’s just say that he likes to put his body to the test. He has had so many concussions that he’s not allowed to do contact sports any more, but like any macho man, he continues to defy doctors orders. I keep telling him that I don’t want to be mashing up food to feed a baby and my husband at the same time in life, so he’d better be careful, but he just doesn’t really know any better. He enjoys the camaraderie of a team sport and the physical action of smashing his body into someone else’s and hearing the resounding crunch afterwards.

In addition, he’s a large, hulk of a man. Six feet tall with broad shoulders and additional protection around the middle. No one would mistake him for the intellectual that he actually is. While his style of dress is improving, he is far from the world of a metrosexual. He’s a used t-shirt and sweat pants kind of man. The only time that he can be coerced out of his usual ensemble is when he goes to work or we venture out to dinner. Even then he continues to pick out some really hideous sport coats in bizarre fabrics and plaids that only one with a very limited fashion sense or limited eyesight would enjoy. Clearly, my husband is your typical male.

However, as we started planning our wedding a few years ago, it became evident that he was more than meets the eye. While his creation of a scrapbook for the big proposal should have tipped me off, I did not truly realize what hidden talents lay beneath his toilet seat leaving up exterior. As much as he tried to hide it, he knew more about weddings than I did and voiced an opinion on everything. While some husbands might shun this whole rigmarole of mother -daughter fighting and color palette selection, he was getting his hands dirty with the rest of us.

One day, as we sat smothered by leather-bound volume upon leather-bound volume of wedding invitations in the stationary store with floral printed chairs, ribbons, and cute knick knacks abounding, you would have thought that my husband would want to bolt or at least walk in like an embarrassed celebrity with his sweatshirt blocking a clear shot of his face. Instead, he strode in like a white knight entering the queen’s kingdom with my mother, my wedding planner, and me. He poured over the books with us, pointing out a color preference here, an embellishment there, and this went on for a while. As someone who doesn’t like to shop, I was done within a half an hour of this antiquated ritual, but my husband to be hung in there with me, like Jack in the Titanic, except I think that he prevented me from drifting off to sea.

After my husband had made yet another intuitive comment about the texture of an invitation, my wedding planner looked up at him in awe and surprise that not only was he still there, but he was still engaged in what I had come to think of as a horrific process. By this point, even I was toying with the fact that eloping might be easier than picking an invitation. As she stared at him, brow furrowed, lips tightly pressed together, in intense concentration you could practically see the light bulb turn on in her mind as she exclaimed, “You are unbelievable. I know what you are, you are a machosexual.” So, it was decided.

Later on in the wedding planning bonanza came the selection of music. I didn’t even know what the wedding song was called but up piped my husband with a request for Pachelbel’s Canon in D. He even knew other wedding songs that he wanted to hear, by name! Who was this man? One minute he’s spouting wedding songs and the next minute he’s knocking back a pitcher of beer or hocking a loogie on the street. As the music lady looked at him with eyes wide and mouth agape, I sat there completely disengaged in the entire proceeding since I didn’t know any of the music to which they were referring, I just wanted the ones that sounded nice. My wedding planner, attempting to resuscitate the musician, just turned to her and explained, “He’s a machosexual.” I do not know if the woman knew what she meant, but she seemed to be more at ease after the proclamation.

I’m not going to lie; there were definitely times when more of the macho side showed through. For instance, during the cake tasting, as my mother and I took a small bite out of each little slice of cake, my husband’s entire plate was inhaled in a matter of seconds, like there had never been cake on it to begin with. He was a human vacuum cleaner and thus it was no surprise that he liked all of the cakes, probably because he couldn’t distinguish between any of them as they were shoved in a mashed jumble down his esophagus.

Nevertheless, I think the term machosexual is perfect for my husband and I don’t know what I would have done without his tendencies during the wedding planning process. I had always known that he had secret talents most often associated with estrogen, but this experience confirmed it. I love his manly side, as it makes me feel safe and comforted, and this strength is what attracted me to him in the first place. However, thankfully he has this alter ego that only comes out for good, such as wedding planning and wedding proposal scrapbooking. So, if you are one of those women that is trying to rationalize a normal beer drinking, ESPN stalking, can’t cook anything other than bacon husband with the man who recently made you a picture frame or created a mixed cd of famous love songs for your anniversary, you are not alone. There is a name for people like that- machosexual.