Being the Mid Wife to a Hot Husband
I'm pretty sure my husband is out of my league. How did I pull this off?
Recently, I wrote about how my husband’s ex-situationship/hookup sent us actual, physical hate mail after our wedding. A common theme in the responses to this article was, “Wait…your husband must be like…really hot.”
Yes, my husband is hot. I feel like I’ve said this many times. I am, many might say, the prototypical “horny husband girl.” I’ve never posted my husband’s face, and I probably never will unless it’s some weird AI-gone-wild situation where President ChatGPT is going to nuke Canada unless I do it, but I have posted his uhh…physique…before, in a few beach photos, and like….
But I feel like the feedback “Your husband must be/is really hot” doesn’t feel the same to me the way “Your wife is hot” might feel to a man. The latter implies high fives, the former is a bit of an indictment on your own role as the desired party. Society is full of men bragging about how their ho-hum selves landed their gorgeous wives by being funny and charming. You don’t really see the female version of this, because it’s frankly, embarrassing. There is no “dumpy SEC frat guy with a smokeshow girlfriend” archetype with the genders reversed, and if there is, people usually just assume the guy is gay or just wants casual sex. Of course, I am very happy my husband is good-looking and fit, and I’m not insinuating that I’m ugly, just “not as hot.” But when you’re a woman, there’s something a bit humiliating about the possibility that you are the one who snagged a hottie and got lucky, even if it’s not a wide gap in hotness—that my husband is Princess Leia to my Jabba the Hutt. Perhaps this is one reason I feel it’s verboten for me to initiate sex.
I even felt a little weird when I watched the movie Roses and saw Benedict Cumberbatch purportedly married to Olivia Colman. Benedict Cumberbatch is not necessarily a total stud, and Olivia Colman is hardly hideous, but I guess it just felt…off? Even if they’re both middle-aged and she’s only slightly less attractive than he is, the entire relationship felt implausible. And yet, if the genders were reversed, I’d probably have thought nothing of it. I had to wonder if they did this on purpose, the way Netflix original movies made a point of gratuitously displaying women’s pit hair during the late 2010s, as if to make a point about “normalization.” I know, I know, I’m horrible! But I can’t help what I notice!
Is discomfort with this hotness delta innate to most straight women? Is being the desired, and not the desire-er, just antithetical to the way most straight women’s sexualities work? Or does this reflex come from a lifetime of imagery where the only mismatched couples include a hotter woman and less hot man, constant messages that women are rewarded with hot partners only if they’re willing to date ugly ones (Beauty and the Beast, Princess and the Frog) and repeated reminders that it’s only the women who “date down” in looks, never the men, that men don’t care about anything other than youth and beauty and women “aren’t visual?” Or is this pairing truly just an anomaly because men really do care about looks more than women, women are better-looking than men, ergo, theater camp mids like myself rarely land athletic hunks? And if that’s true, how the hell did I do it?
