I said I’d rather date a FedEx driver. In my dream, thirty-two of them showed up.
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I had the dream again.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon, about three months after Magnificent Men™: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire comes out. I’m in my back office at home, barefoot, surrounded by cold coffee and sticky notes, losing an argument with a semicolon.
My husband appears in the doorway. He has the look of a man choosing his words very carefully.
“Honey,” he says. “The police are here.”
I put down my pen. “Is someone hurt?”
“No. Nobody’s hurt.” He pauses. “There are thirty-two FedEx trucks parked around the block.”
I wait for the rest of the sentence. There isn’t any.
“Thirty-two,” he repeats, as if the number might mean something different the second time. “And the drivers are all just standing there. Some of them brought flowers.”
The officer on the porch would like to know whether I’m aware of the situation. I am not aware of the situation. I am, however, beginning to suspect I caused it.
II. The Convoy
Here is what I should explain to the officer, and do not. A while back I wrote an article about why so many good men have given up on dating. In it I said, in public, under my own name, that I would rather date a FedEx driver with a good heart than a man who works eighty hours a week and has no time for love.
I meant it. I still mean it.
What I did not anticipate is that FedEx drivers read.
They read on their lunch breaks. They read in the cab and in the loading bay before dawn. And somewhere between the article and the book, word got around the depot. Not long after that article went up, a reader who once drove for FedEx sent me a lovely note. In the dream, he is the one who organized the convoy. He has seniority.
Thirty-two trucks. Purple and orange in every driveway, double-parked by the mailboxes, one of them wedged into the cul-de-sac in a way that defies physics. The neighbors are out on their lawns. Somebody’s dog has lost its mind.
Every driver is in uniform, shorts included, regardless of the weather, because a FedEx driver in long pants is a myth on par with Bigfoot.
They are not here to deliver anything.
They’re here to apply to be worshipped.
III. “Are You Her Servant?”
My husband, being the man that he is, does not call for backup. He walks out to the curb in his socks with puppy dogs on them to find out what these men want.
The first driver looks him up and down. Polite. Curious. A little territorial.
“You work for her?” he asks. “Like her assistant? Her servant?”
My husband considers the question with the seriousness it deserves. Then he says, “I’m her husband.”
The silence that falls over the block can only be described as liturgical.
Thirty-two men take off their caps.
Because here is the thing about the men who read that article. They didn’t come for me, not really. They came for the promise inside it: that somewhere out there, a woman might look at a working man and see a treasure instead of a tax bracket. And standing in front of them, in his adorable puppy dog socks, is the living proof. The guy who actually got chosen.
They don’t see a rival. They see a man who won the lottery and still takes out the trash.
One of them shakes his hand. Then another. Then they are lining up.
“What’s it like?” one of them asks quietly.
My husband thinks about it. “She plays the drums at seven in the morning,” he says. “And every single day she tells me I’m magnificent.”
They nod like he has told them something holy.
IV. The Barbecue
By four o’clock, somebody has a grill.
I don’t know whose grill it is. It was not there at lunch. FedEx drivers, it turns out, can produce a grill the way magicians produce doves. Someone else has a cooler. Someone else has a speaker playing classic rock that is, frankly, excellent.
The police officer was supposed to write a report. He is now in charge of the burgers. He takes this responsibility more seriously than I’ve seen a man take anything in years.
And me? I never leave the back office. I have a chapter on blow jobs to finish.
I can hear them through the window. Men laughing the way men laugh when nobody is grading them. Stories about dogs on the route. A truly heroic saga involving a lost package and a blizzard. Somebody’s daughter just made varsity. Somebody’s wife left two years ago, and he’s doing better now, thanks for asking.
I smell the burgers. I hear my husband’s laugh rise above all of it.
And I realize, with a mixture of joy and professional jealousy, that I wrote an entire book about men being seen, and my husband just pulled it off in one afternoon with a spatula.
Around sunset, the drivers form a circle on the front lawn. The senior man steps forward holding a folded uniform shirt. By unanimous vote, they make my husband an honorary FedEx driver, effective immediately, with full rights to the breakroom donuts.
He pulls the shirt on over his T-shirt. It fits perfectly.
It now hangs in his closet. He wears it on special occasions. This bothers me more than I will admit.
V. Gentlemen, Start Your Engines
The invitations start arriving the following week.
The company picnic. A softball league. And then, unbelievably, the racetrack. FedEx drivers have pull, it turns out, and somebody’s cousin knows somebody in the hospitality tent. My husband gets a pass to the races, where the FedEx car roars around the track and grown men weep openly into their nachos.
Somewhere in that tent, the CEO himself hears the story. The convoy. The police. The barbecue. The honorary shirt.
He walks over, shakes my husband’s hand, and says, “So you’re the guy.”
Then he asks him if he’d like to take a lap.
My husband doesn’t hesitate. Of course he doesn’t. That’s why I married him.
He climbs into the car. He takes the lap. He comes back grinning like a twelve-year-old who just found out he gets to keep the puppy.
I watch from the stands. I am not driving. I am not the story. For once in my life, I am simply the woman who gets to watch the man she loves be celebrated by a grandstand full of strangers.
It is the best seat I have ever had.
VI. Then I Wake Up
No trucks. No grill. No police officer flipping burgers. Just my bedroom, coffee waiting to be made, and a manuscript that still has typos in Part 2.
And no husband. Not yet. Damn.
I haven’t met him. He’s out there somewhere, probably tightening a bolt that was already tight, probably a little underappreciated, probably not reading articles by provocative women with trademark applications. Or maybe he is.
But I know what the dream was telling me.
It was never about FedEx. It was about what happens when a woman says, out loud and in public, that a good man’s heart is worth more than his title. Men hear it. They show up. They take off their caps. And the man who already has that kind of love doesn’t become their rival. He becomes their brother.
That is the world I want. A world where the man who gets chosen is celebrated by the men still waiting, and every one of them drives home believing it could happen to him, too.
It can.
Gentlemen, I meant every word. I would still rather date a FedEx driver with a good heart.
But only one of you gets to be my husband. The other thirty-one of you are invited to the barbecue.
Pretty please?
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Companion Song:
— Convoy, C.W. McCall, 1975
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.
