"Dear Husband" And Beyond - Monikers For Our Menfolk

This will be a shortish post - I just popped over to my neighbour's, where we chewed the cud about our respective T K Maxx habits, and I drank a large glass of rosé on an empty stomach. I sense the wine may not be conducive to writing coherent content on any topic. Or "cogent content", even, which I see someone has registered as a domain name.

Anyway, as the perfume blogosector is a predominantly female community, and my brain prone to silly diversions, I took a moment out the other day to consider the different names commonly used to denote our menfolk. To avoid discrimination, I should probably have been more gender-vague there and said "spouses and partners", but the alliterative power of "menfolk" was simply too compelling.

Six months into my perfume hobby, I discovered Basenotes, and learnt a great deal about the subject of fragrance from the absorbing array of forum threads. For the first time I also came across the acronym "DH" for "Dear Husband", swiftly followed by those well known Significant Otherly flankers, "BF" and "GF" for "Boyfriend" and "Girlfriend", not forgetting "SO" itself. The latter should not be confused with "SOC", which stands for "Scene Of Crime", and is only likely to be invoked when the Other becomes significantly less significant, veering to dead man walking. Or woman, obviously.

Which brings me neatly to my point that "Dear Husband" is a bit of a "one-spouse-fits all" kind of a term. What about a word for the husband who persistently snores and forgets to put the bin out, who hogs the remote and tells you you cannot have a birthday present because you were away and "the moment has passed". So either we need a range of counterbalancing qualifiers, such as "Damn Husband" or "Periodically Infuriating But I Am Quite Fond Of Him Really Husband" OR - and this is the approach perfumistas seem to have adopted - we need a more neutral style of moniker.

So here is a small shortlist of ones I have observed - by no means exhaustive - so I would be glad to hear from you if you have one to add.

MR BONKERS (sounds more pejorative than neutral, I hear you say. Ah, but not in the context of a blog called Bonkers about Perfume. Moreover, I am prepared to stand up and be counted as "Mrs Bonkers". Or even "Ms Bonkers", as we are not married.)

HIMSELF - Chickenfreak's Obsession

THE CEO - Muse in Wooden Shoes (For quite some time I thought the CEO was Muse's boss, but this interpretation made for an implausibly racy read, so I re-assigned the name to her husband, which suited the context much better.)

BIG - Wordbird (Facebook / Twitter / Basenotes)

MOTH (Man Of The House) - Bloody Frida

MY OTHER NOSTRIL - The Left Coast Nose (I am proud to say I had a hand in this one - or do I mean a finger up it? Anyway, I made this one up, and The LCN toggles between My Other Nostril and Bazr when referring to her other half.)

B-MAN - Notes from Josephine

MY HUSBAND - Hortus Conclusus (I admire her naturalism - and after all, it was going spare!)

And then there are titbits we learn about other people's spouses, without their having a nickname as such. For example, we know that Katie Puckrik's husband is freckled. This could be a crucial nugget of information if he ever went missing, and the perfume community was called upon to assist the LAPD in their search efforts.

I am sure there are more, but those are the ones my rosé-fogged brain can readily retrieve. Staying with the weekend's Mediterranean theme, I will sign off with a photo of a "blissed out Mr Bonkers" in Greece in 1996.


Photo of "Dear Husband" card from indiacarddukan.com, photo of rose-coloured glasses from Google images.