How a good man’s flaws, quirks, and glorious peculiarities become pure gold.
I’m not married. Not yet. But lately, as I’ve been contemplating the arrival of my future husband, I’ve found myself looking forward to something that might strike some people as completely fucking nuts.
I can’t wait to discover his flaws. His quirks. His peculiar little habits. His idiosyncrasies. All those wonderfully human things that make him unlike any other man on earth.
I’m not talking about reluctantly accepting his imperfections because I love him. I’m talking about loving him all the more because of them.
I want to discover the little things that might drive another woman crazy and find myself smiling because they’re so unmistakably him.
I don’t want a perfect man. I want the exquisite privilege of knowing a real one, right down to the smallest, strangest, most endearing details.
The Underwear Drawer
So I’ve started playing a little game. Here’s how it goes. I imagine him. Not his face or his faith or his shoulders, though believe me, I’ve given those plenty of thought. I imagine his drawers. His cupboards. His glove compartment. The small, private, slightly deranged systems a man builds when nobody is watching. Maybe he alphabetizes his underwear.
I don’t even know how that would work. By brand? By color? Boxers before briefs, navy before nude? Is there a subsection for the lucky pair? Is there a lucky pair? I have questions, and I would like him to sit me down on the edge of the bed and answer every single one of them with a perfectly straight face.
Maybe he names his cars. Not cute names. Dignified names. Gerald. Margaret. A pickup truck called the Admiral that he addresses with the respect due a senior officer.
Maybe he keeps every instruction manual he has ever been handed, in a binder, with tabs. Maybe he has a ranking of potato chips, and the ranking has tiers, and he can defend the tiers. Maybe he salutes magpies. Maybe he won’t let anyone else pack the trunk of the car, because there is a correct way, and the correct way lives in his head, and the rest of us are amateurs.
Maybe he hums the Jeopardy theme while the microwave runs. Every time. For the full ninety seconds.
Maybe he eats a sandwich in a strict clockwise rotation and gets quietly rattled if you take a bite out of turn. Maybe he refuses, on principle, to use the word “moist.” Maybe he has a favorite screwdriver. Not a preferred one. A favorite. With a name.
I lie there imagining this stuff and I laugh out loud, alone, like a woman who has lost her mind. And then something else happens. My chest gets warm. Because whatever his thing turns out to be — and he’ll have a thing, every man worth marrying has a thing — I already love it. I don’t know what it is yet, and I love it.
That’s the part that sounds nuts. It’s also the part I would stake my life on.
What Everyone Before Me Tried to Fix
Somewhere there was a little boy who lined up his Matchbox cars by color, bumper to bumper, a perfect rainbow stretched across the living room carpet. And somewhere there was a grown-up who walked past and said, “Why can’t you just play with them like a normal kid?”
He heard that. Of course he heard it. Boys hear everything.
Then came the teacher who told him to stop asking so many questions. The coach who told him to quit clowning around. The older brother who told him that thing he did with his hands was weird. The college girlfriend who rolled her eyes when he got excited about the history of the paperclip. The woman he lived with for six years who called his habits “things we need to work on” and kept a mental list, and occasionally an actual list, stuck to the refrigerator.
Not everyone was trying to be cruel. Most of them loved him in their way. But the message landed all the same, and it landed the same way every time: The real you is a little too much. Tone it down. Sand off the corners. Be easier to live with.
So he did. Men are extraordinarily good at this. He learned which parts of himself got the eye-roll, and he tucked them out of sight. He still alphabetizes the underwear — of course he does — but he does it when nobody’s home. He still ranks the potato chips, quietly, in his head, like a man keeping a secret diary.
By forty, he’s presenting the world with a beautifully managed version of himself. Pleasant. Reasonable. Nothing too odd. And he is lonely in a way he couldn’t explain if you asked him, because the man everyone likes isn’t quite him. It’s the edited edition.
I don’t want the edited edition. I want the director’s cut. The bloopers. The deleted scenes.
The Golden God Effect
Here is the moment I’m waiting for.
Some evening, a few months in, he’ll get that look. The look of a man deciding whether to tell you something. And he’ll say, a little sheepishly, “Okay. You’re going to think this is strange.”
And he’ll open the drawer.
He’ll be braced for it. I’ll see it in his shoulders. He has watched this movie before and he knows how it ends: the laugh that isn’t quite with him, the raised eyebrow, the “Oh my God, babe,” the story she tells her friends later.
And I’m going to step closer, look into that immaculate, alphabetized drawer, and say, “Show me how it works.”
Then I’m going to make him explain the whole system. Every rule. Every exception. Why the gray ones go where they go. And I’m going to listen like he’s revealing the secrets of the pyramids, because to me, he is.
Watch what happens to a man in that moment. Watch his face. The bracing goes out of him. He stands up a little straighter. He starts talking faster. There’s a light in him that wasn’t there a minute ago. He isn’t managing anything anymore. He’s just being himself, out loud, in front of a woman who is thrilled by it.
That’s when he turns gold.
Not because he’s flawless. God, no. Because he’s finally standing in the right light. Gold isn’t something a man has to earn by becoming perfect. Gold is what he looks like when a woman stops squinting at him and starts beaming at him.
A man who is delighted in becomes more generous. More playful. Braver. He stops spending his energy hiding and starts spending it on loving you back. Every quirk you meet with a smile is one less thing he has to guard. Keep that up long enough and you’ll have a man who no longer feels he has to hide the things that make him himself.
And here’s the secret nobody tells you: the light goes both ways. The woman doing the beaming gets something too. She gets to live with a man who is fully, unguardedly himself, which is about the most entertaining thing on God’s green earth. She gets a front-row seat. She gets the private tour of the museum that’s closed to the public. Every other woman got the lobby and the gift shop. She gets the vault.
That’s my golden god. Not a marble statue on a pedestal. A man standing over his underwear drawer, grinning, explaining the system.
The Woman at Brunch
I already know how this is going to go at brunch. There’s a ritual among women — you know the one — where we bond by complaining about our men. One says he leaves every cabinet door open like a poltergeist lives in the kitchen. Another says he narrates his own parallel parking like a golf commentator. Another says he won’t throw away a single rubber band, ever, and there is now a rubber band ball in the garage the size of a cantaloupe.
Everybody groans. Everybody nods. It’s a sport.
Then they’ll turn to me. “What about yours?”
And I’m going to set down my mimosa and say, “Mine alphabetizes his underwear.”
They’ll groan in sympathy. Oh, honey.
And I’ll say, “I know. Isn’t it fantastic?”
I’m not going to complain about him. I’m going to brag about him, about the exact same kinds of things the others are complaining about. Because that rubber band ball is not a problem to be solved. It’s a monument. It’s a man who believes, against all available evidence, that someday he is going to need exactly that rubber band. I find that hopeful. Frankly, I find it kind of hot.
Here’s the thing about complaining: it trains the eye. Talk about a man’s annoying habits long enough and annoying is all you’ll ever see. Brag about them instead and you’ll start finding wonderful things in places nobody else thought to look.
I’d rather be the woman whose husband walks into the restaurant and every woman at the table thinks, What does she know that I don’t?
A Word Before the Emails
Quick and clear, because somebody will ask: I’m talking about quirks, not cruelty.
A man who alphabetizes his underwear is a treasure. A man who alphabetizes your faults is a different article.
The habits I’m talking about hurt nobody. They’re odd, they’re specific, they’re occasionally ridiculous, and they belong to him as much as his voice does. Anything that wounds, deceives, or diminishes doesn’t qualify as a quirk, no matter how charmingly it’s packaged.
Dear Future Husband
So this is for you, wherever you are tonight. Probably folding laundry in a way you’ve never explained to anyone.
Bring it.
Bring the binder of manuals and the potato chip tiers. Bring the car named Gerald. Bring the trunk-packing doctrine and the magpie salute and whatever it is you do while the microwave runs. Bring the strange little system you’ve never shown a living soul, because the last time you showed somebody, they laughed the wrong way.
I won’t laugh the wrong way. I’ll laugh the right way. The way that means more, please.
You don’t have to clean yourself up for me. You don’t have to sand anything down. I didn’t spend decades studying love to end up with a man who keeps half of himself hidden in a drawer.
Just open it. Show me how it works. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while now.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Companion Song:
— Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Queen, 1979
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and provocateur whose work explores love, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and the magnificent complexity of being human. For more than three decades, she has explored what helps people connect more deeply, love more courageously, and create extraordinary relationships. Her writing blends psychology, spirituality, humor, and eroticism, with a particular passion for restoring the dignity and value of men and exploring the possibilities of Hot and Holy Love. At the heart of her work is a simple conviction: all human beings deserve and are capable of extraordinary love — and a beautiful life.
