“I got a pedicure today,” I said to my husband as I showed off my freshly painted toes that glimmered from beneath my flip-flops. “What do you think?”
“They’re orange,” he said.
“They’re not orange,” I corrected him. “They’re cantaloupe.”
He blinked a couple of times trying to process this irrelevant piece of information.
“OK,” he replied. “But they don’t match your pink fingers.”
I shook my head.
“They’re not pink. They’re raspberry.”
“Does it really matter what you call them?” he asked.
“Yes. If you just say pink, they could be a soft pink or a vibrant pink or a cotton candy pink. But when you say raspberry, you know exactly what color pink they are. They are raspberry-colored pink.”
He stared at me dumbly.
“Don’t you have anything you want to say?” I asked, fishing for a compliment.
“Yes,” he replied. “I wish I was colorblind.”
I put my hands on my hips in a huff. Yes, I knew that, in the grand scheme of things, clarifying my nail color to my husband was not going to solve the problem of world peace.
But I felt it was my job to enlighten him on behalf of all the misunderstood manicured women in the world.
“Get what you want. Just don’t get it in raspberry.”
We had been through this once before, he and I. Before I decided to go to a salon, I had colored my own hair for a number of years.
I tried out a bunch of different browns, including warm medium brown, chestnut brown, mocha brown and latte brown — and the ones that dare not be named, which made me look alternately like Elvis Presley and Little Orphan Annie.
When I tried to explain to my husband that there was more than one kind of brown and I needed to be clear about which brown I wanted or there could be dire consequences (see above Little Orphan Annie reference), his eyes glazed over and he fell into some kind of boredom-induced trance that only a pint of Ben & Jerry’s could revive him from.
I realized eventually that this wasn’t something that was unique to him.
After conversations with my brother and my son about my raspberry nails, I thought that this might, in fact, be a gender-related issue.
“Do you like my raspberry-colored nails?” I asked my son.
“They’re pink,” he said.
“Yes, but they’re raspberry pink,” I said.
“Will they make my dinner cook faster?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then I don’t care,” he replied.
I was pretty much at the point where I thought gene therapy was the only thing that would help bridge this gender gap.
And then my husband decided it was time for us to get a new car.
“I’m looking at this model, but I can’t decide on the trim,” he said, showing me the car he wanted on the computer.
“What’s a trim?” I asked.
“It’s the features you can get with the car.”
“OK, what are the options?”
“We can get an LX, an LX-S, an EX, an EX-L or a Touring.”
“They all look exactly the same,” I said.
“No, they don’t,” he said. “They’re very different.”
“I don’t see it,” I said.
He sighed.
“You can’t see it. It’s inside.”
“OK. Whatever,” I replied. “Get what you want. Just don’t get it in raspberry.”
