Man Says Minivans Are Too Feminine & Refuses To Buy One For His Family, Even Though It's Safer
"Your fragile masculinity is costing our family so much money."
RossHelen / Canva Pro We've all met a parent or two who refuses to buy a minivan — they're not exactly anyone's idea of a "dream car," after all. They're not exciting; they often look like Dustbusters on wheels, and at least for many among the younger generations, they've become a symbol that one's identity has been completely subsumed by parenthood.
But many parents relent and buy one anyway because there's no way around the simple fact that minivans make life so much easier, and often much safer when you're lugging a bunch of kids around. For one dad online, however, not even that is worth it— for the most ridiculous reason possible.
He refuses to buy a minivan for his family because they're 'too feminine.'
Okay, now we've heard everything. The man's wife wrote in a Reddit post that she did her level best to accommodate her husband's preference for SUVs over minivans, but now she's at her wit's end, and it's causing major drama between them.
It all began in 2021 when they had their fourth child and outgrew their good old dependable Toyota RAV4.
If ever there's a time to embrace the minivan, it's when you have four kids and four times the STUFF you must lug around to keep them fed, clean, and entertained. And for her part, the mom "was open and ready to embrace minivan life and was planning to buy something reliable and safe, like a Honda or Kia."
However, her husband, Craig, was only willing to get an SUV. "In his mind, minivans were 'too feminine.'"
They ended up with an SUV that is now so unsafe the mom takes an Uber to work, but her husband still refuses to buy a minivan.
"Against my better judgment, we ended up purchasing a used 2018 Mercedes GLS 450, mainly due to his insistence," she wrote. She agreed to it since it was priced similarly to the loaded Honda vans she was looking at.
Big mistake. Big. Huge. Two years in, "I can safely say we made the wrong choice," she wrote. There's not enough cargo space for all the stuff they have to lug around, but more importantly, "the reliability has been junk."
It's been subject to eight recalls since they bought it and is constantly in the shop "because something always seems to be broken." They've racked up $9,000 in repairs, and they haven't even put that many miles on it yet.
"I don't feel safe driving it around with my kids," she wrote, "and I've even started getting nightmares about it stranding us in the middle of nowhere." It's now to a point where she takes Ubers instead of driving it.
Her husband still refused to buy a minivan, so she told him, 'Your fragile masculinity is costing our family money.'
After a recent disastrous day trying to haul four kids to a soccer game in an Uber — an experience that should frankly be grounds for divorce in and of itself — the mom finally had enough and confronted her husband.
"He listened at first, but when I suggested selling it, he cut me off and said that he wasn’t getting a van just because I wanted that," she wrote. A fight ensued, and when she finally hit her limit, she bellowed the simple truth: "Your fragile masculinity is costing our family so much money!"
Now, her husband is not speaking to her because he's a giant baby man who "also refuses lip balm and purple dress shirts" because they, too, are not masculine enough for him.
As you might guess, absolutely nobody on Reddit had an ounce of patience for this guy, especially since he's putting his family in danger over his dumb obsession with appearing like an "alpha male" — and doing the weakest, most embarrassing baby man antics possible in order to prove it.
As one Redditor sarcastically put it, "Your all-consuming fear of being seen in a minivan is so manly. The way you're willing to ignore my comfort and our children's safety really gets my engine going, if you know what I mean."
"Things your husband is scared of," another sniped. "Mini Vans; Lip Balm; The color purple Yeah, he sounds super manly."
It's a shame that our culture — and the ever-rising tide of popular misogyny in the so-called online "manosphere" filling men's heads with what is simultaneously the stupidest and most violent rhetoric ever conceived — makes men feel this way.
But men, no matter how fragile, are grown adults, and a "real man" — whatever that even means — would get over his hang-ups and do what he has to do to keep his family safe instead of being so afraid of a MINIVAN, of all things, his wife and kids have to take Ubers everywhere. How embarrassing.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.