Emasculate vs. Effeminate

Last night my husband came home from working interstate for the first time in two weeks and suggested we go out for dinner. We had a lovely spontaneous date night at a delicious Greek/Italian restaurant started not long ago by a local celebrity chef. The crux of this post was going to be about gratitude for having my husband home somewhat unexpectedly for the weekend. As nice as chats-in-bed over the phone are, obviously they're ten times (perhaps even a hundred times) better when we're actually beside each other in the same bed. Anyway, that's what it was supposed to be about. Then he said something and I ended up lying awake in the middle of the night ruminating.
Some background: often it's our habit, when we go out for dinner just the two of us, to decide what we each want, then my husband relays the order to the waiter. I am happy with this arrangement because of my shyness and difficulty hearing in loud, crowded places. I sometimes wonder, though, how it would look to Caitlin Moran or Naomi Wolf, were they sitting at the next table. Would they think I was unliberated? They would be wrong. My husband and I have a very pragmatically equal partnership in most domains.
Now, back to the thing he said at dinner. Last night I felt keyed up and full of confidence (from working at a writer's festival event and having been to said restaurant before) so I placed the order for our entrees and my main. After my husband had ordered his main and the waiter left I half-laughed/apologised for taking over and changing our normal procedure without consulting him first. He replied, 'It's ok, but a bit emasculating.' Here's my problem, that I lay in bed in the middle of the night thinking about instead of sleeping: why does emasculate have connotations of making my husband less of a man in a negative, turn-him-into-a-genderless-worm sort of a way, but effeminate means a man that has the qualities of a woman, with the implication that this is a bad thing. (We'll deal with the fact that my ordering caused these feelings in my husband in the first place in the privacy of our own home, not in the forum of this blog.) I realise there are several other problems here as well, not the least of which is what's the point of going around asking, like a child, why any thing is called what it is. Why is that long orange thing called 'carrot', why is the blue thing over our head called 'the sky'? I do know that the answer to my post's question is more substantial, historically relevant and politically charged than to those other etymological examples. My point in this post is about the impression these two similar sounding words, from presumably related concepts, leave in one's mind, especially when lying awake at four o'clock in the morning. I think I've come to greatly dislike the word effeminate and will scratch it from my list of acceptable vocabulary forevermore. It now strikes me as out-dated and inappropriate, much like the martial arts instructor, who just this week, sneered at my students saying, 'Don't do girrrrls push-ups, off your knees, boys!'