Men and trucks, men and trucks,
Go together like does and bucks.
This I tell ya, brother, you can't have one without the other.

Men and trucks, men and trucks,
If you want a truckless man you are out of luck.
Ask the local gentry and they will say it's elementary.

Try, try, try to separate them, it's an illusion.
Try, try, try and you only come to this conclusion:

Men and trucks, men and trucks,
Go together like does and bucks.
I was told by mother you can't have one
(It can’t be done)
You can't have one without the other.

—a little twist on Love and Marriage, famously sung by Frank Sinatra


Men and trucks.  They go together like a horse and carriage, so to speak.  Why this is so, I cannot say.  I can only observe that men are born wanting trucks.  When the field of human genetics has advanced a little more, I think we’ll learn that at some point in the far distant past, the Y chromosome imprinted on a truck.  Or maybe the Martian spacecraft that brought males to Earth in the first place had big grilles, mud flaps and flame detailing on the sides.  One way or the other, a truck is Momma, which explains a lot of things when you think about it.

A few weeks ago, my husband K— decided he needed a new car…and promptly began shopping for a new truck.  Now, I love K— dearly and don’t want to deny him anything he’d enjoy (well, perhaps some things), but I am opposed to the truck idea.  First, there’s the cost issue.  With the dollars per gallon of gasoline and miles per gallon of gasoline for most trucks quickly converging, a pickup just isn’t affordable.

There’s also the need aspect.  As it happens, I am in a line of work in which a truck might actually be of some use, yet I don’t own one because I don’t actually need one most of the time.  K— is in a line of work so technology driven he barely even has to physically go to work.  A vehicle of any description is almost unnecessary for him, much less a truck.

This explains why, when he began shopping for the truck, he tried to get me in his corner by saying he was buying it for us.  Ladies, you know the us argument.  Anything a man wants is for us.  Anything a woman wants is for her.

He didn’t get very far with that attempt at manipulation.  Apparently believing that if you can’t have what you want you might as well want more, that’s when he began shopping for the luxury truck—one with leather seats that adjust 14 different ways, an audiophile sound system, individual climate controls, and that kind of stuff.

This really bugged me because there’s something inherently disturbing and unnatural about a truck with a luxury interior.  It’s the automotive version of a three-eyed frog.  Somethin’ ain’t right there.

Plus, that luxury interior boosted the cost of his truck into the stratosphere, and I remarked to K— one day that I thought paying as much for a truck as a BMW was ridiculous.  At that, he switched gears again and began…shopping for a BMW.  Talk about jumping from one midlife crisis to another.

It occurred to me that an excuse to shop for a BMW might have been what K— was looking for all along and that he set me up to hand it to him on a silver platter.  He’s sly that way.  More than likely, though, my Sir Spendalot was just indulging two equally extravagant whims, because a short while later I overheard K— talking to a friend about whether to get a truck or a BMW as though one were the obvious alternative to the other.  He was explaining how he was afraid that if he didn’t buy a truck, it would become an obsession because owning a truck is just something he needs to “work through”—as if truck ownership was the necessary therapy for some deep emotional problem rooted in childhood trauma.

“Aha!” I thought when I heard that.  K— didn’t realize it, but he’d just given me a secret weapon.

The next time he asked my opinion on the whole car/truck matter I told him that I thought his psychological mumbo-jumbo was a creative justification for buying a vehicle twice the size and/or twice the price and/or with half the gas mileage as one that made sense, but I assured him that the decision was entirely his and I was keeping out of it.  Then, after pausing just long enough to allow him to think he’d won, I mentioned that I hoped he’d remember my hands-off stance when I decided that spending six months on a beach in Malaysia flirting with cute blond Australian tourists was something I needed to “work through.”

Even I didn’t anticipate the reaction to that.  K— went out and got his old car fixed instead of buying anything new, car or truck.  The frugal side of me is happy, but I’m uneasy.  I keep having this gnawing feeling that the matter isn’t really closed, that I’ve fallen into some trap K— has laid for me but which hasn’t yet snapped shut.  Or maybe I’m just blue because the whole Malaysia fantasy was so short-lived and now appears impossible without giving K— grounds for divorce.

But I have an idea.  Maybe I can persuade K— that I need to go to Malaysia…for us.