"I just dont understand," I told my friend one night. "How come the ladies dont like me anymore?" "Dude!" he grinned, "it's because you're still in that metrosexual mindset. Women dont want that anymore! Now they want retrosexuals!" "Huh?" "Dudes that know how to hunt, man. Dudes that pay for a lady's date. Dudes that dont wear anything but jeans and a flannel shirt when it's minus thirty outside. Dig?" I did. I hated being a "metrosexual", with all its attendant fussiness to "feelings" and "shared experiences" and "concerns". I wanted to go back to being a man again, dammit. But in the four years since losing my way, I'd forgotten how. My friend grinned. "Dude, trust me." So, with his help, I re-learned my masculinity. I learned it was okay to cry... but only when my football team was losing and it was the end of the fourth quarter. I learned it was okay to leave the toilet seat up. I threw out my cashmere sweaters and do-it-yourself bow ties; if I couldnt do it with a single Windsor, I couldnt be bothered. "Dude, trust me." I learned to open doors for any lady, even the ones marginally described by gender. I learned to offer my seat on a crowded bus to any woman, pregnant or not, or to any member of the military below the grade of CO. And when I did, I learned to give my best visual snarl to the three-piece-suited wimps who suddenly hid behind their copies of the Wall Street Journal. "Dude, trust me." I learned to appreciate red meat all over again, the rarer the better. As my friend told me, a Retrosexual doesn't worry about living to be ninety. It's not how long you live, but how well. In his mind, if you're 90 years old and still smoking cigars and drinking, you're doing damn good. "Dude, trust me." I quit my job as an accountant and got a real one, a more satisfying one, back in the construction trade, where I started when I left school. I learned how to use hand tools all over again, not because I needed to, but because I wanted to. I learned the value of just giving my word and a handshake instead of hiding behind a thirty-page contract. "Dude, trust me." And suddenly I felt great about my life. I was a man again. It was like a decade's worth of anxiety and worry just... disappeared, and I could breathe. I wasnt an animal; I just was what biology wanted me to be. My friend and I took up old hobbies together, things my fiancee and all my dates never understood: boxing, working on the car, cigars. So that Friday, after I clocked out, my buddy (my buddy, not my "friend") went for a beer, and the women were all over us. We were confident and strong; we were taking testosterone out for a walk and a talk. At the end of the night, we'd brushed the women off and headed back to my place for another beer and the taped replay of Colts-Panthers game. During the game, we started talking about sex. "Dude," my friend says, "what women dont understand is, we just wanna get off. That's all. It's just what we're hard-wired for, y'know?" "But, like, what about all that stuff about making sure she reaches climax as well? Doesnt that matter?" "Sure," he says, "but she has to take some responsibility, y'know?" "I guess." "Cut through it all, and, for guys, it's just sex. Dude, trust me." It was close to 4AM when it was over, so I said, What the hell, stay here. You're in no shape to drive home, and I aint calling a cab. So we hit the sheets, and I'm lying there thinking I havent felt this close to another human being my entire life. So I gave him a hug. And he gives me this look, like, WTF? And I just grinned. "Dude, trust me."