We all have phobias, with some being more common than others: Fear of heights, fear of spiders, fear of death. But, one NASCAR legend has a rarely heard of fear that nearly kept him from getting married.
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During an episode of his podcast, Dale Earnhardt Jr. revealed that he has a very real phobia about metal jewelry. In fact, he gets so grossed out by metal jewelry that he can’t stand wearing it or being close to it.
“(My wife) Amy thought that I was making it up and that there’s no such thing as a jewelry phobia,” Earnhardt explained. “But there is a word. It’s one of them long, crazy words, but it’s real. There’s people that have it.”
Earnhardt’s distaste for metal jewelry is so strong that it almost kept him from getting married. In a 2015 interview, Dale Jr. said, “I have a jewelry phobia. It sounds crazy, but that’s the biggest hold-up for me getting married.”
Thankfully, the driver found a solution when it came time to tie the knot in 2016. Dale Jr. and his wife partnered with a company that sells silicone rings to cater to those who can’t (or won’t) wear metal rings.
“The reason why that fits in our brand is because we’re married, but I also have a jewelry phobia and don’t want to wear metal rings. My wedding ring is actually a wooden ring. I don’t want to wear that too much because it could get scratched or broken, and so I wear Qalo rings, which are like a rubber composite sort of material, and they’re very comfortable,” Earnhardt said.
Even Dale Earnhardt Jr wears a Qalo ring!#KoehnandKoehn #QALO https://t.co/j0VbTPPKR4 pic.twitter.com/mY66bNYX8b
— Koehn&Koehn Jewelers (@kkjwlrs) April 28, 2018
So where exactly did Dale Jr. get his strange fear of jewelry? He blames his sister, Kelley Earnhardt Miller.
“My sister used to chase me around the house with necklaces and stuff. It’s creepy to me,” Dale Jr. said in a 2015 interview. “(Earnhardt Miller) made it worse. She definitely antagonized me and terrorized me when I was younger.”
Dale Jr. isn’t alone in his fear. The fear of jewelry is so real that there is actually a clinical name for it: Kosmemophobia. Do you know of anyone that suffers from kosmemophobia?
Let us know in the comments below.