I've known for a long time that I wasn't the manliest man around (I need my wife to put our Ikea furniture together) but this is a whole different thing. This about societies ideas of what an adult male should be. And I don't fit that description at all.
Most of the problems seem to stem from the fact that I'm stuck in this odd purgatory between adulthood and adolescence. When I got married I had a Simpson's wedding cake topper. I have a job and I own a house yet I find it perfectly acceptable to wear a T-shirt with my favorite video game characters emblazoned on the front. I'll do my own taxes while I watch a Boy Meets World marathon. These are all things my grandfather would have never dreamed of doing. He never wore a T-shirt with a picture of a radio on it to be ironic about his favorite radio personality from childhood. No, he was too busy mining coal and killing Nazis. Yet I need a night light on because I'm afraid of the dark. Sure I say it's due to poor night vision but it's also because I'm afraid of a ghost or monster grabbing my leg from under the bed while I'm on my way to the bathroom. I use words like "chilly, tummy, and adorable". When I see a puppy I talk to it like a newborn baby but when I see a bug (or as I call them buggies) I run the other way. I'm a man-boy and sadly there's an entire generation of guys like me.
Every where you turn there are "men" who are more willing to lend a lady an inappropriate comment then they are a helping hand.
Husband: "Someone help my wife she's choking!"
Random guy: "That's what she said!"
That's not what John Wayne would do in that situation. He would save that choking women, put out a fire, and kill three outlaws all while wearing a sleevless Tapout T-shirt. I don't even own a sleevless Tapout T-shirt. How could I compare to level of manliness? And I'm pretty sure John Wayne wouldn't stop there. He'd rip his T-shirt off and sleep with the man's choking wife and probably every women in that room. That's what real men do. They ooze testosterone and the ladies smell it. I'm still not entirely certain that my wife doesn't have cooties and the idea that she has cooties frightens me.
