I read MaryLynn's blog about why women change their hairstyle after they end a relationship. Most explanations and theories are quite well known. What is not spoken about so often - a sort of unspoken truth - is that men also change their hairstyle, but in order to please a woman, or to impressher. This is evident to see when you read comments by females looking at photographs of long-haired men. Most think it's attractive, and something I still find quite unusual is when men grow their hair much longer than their partner. 

I don't want to generalise and say that every man grows his hair long in order to get a long-haired partner, but some do. Maybe aesthetically it looks pleasing to see a man and woman with the same length of hair - almost like twins. There can be interesting extremes in pairs. A woman with super-short hair dating a man with super-long, or a woman with super-long dating a man with super-short. I've seen both of these phenomena here in the DV community and elsewhere in the virtual long-hair world. It's not only homosexual men who take pride in their hair, or who know how to use soap and shampoo, or to feel pain and raw emotions associated with the growth, or loss of hair ; loss of hair I think causes most men emotional pain. We associate it with being a 'real man,' or in my case, I associate long hair and men with personal freedom.

 At the moment, I feel some freedom and perhaps more peace because of my current short hairstyle. When I changed from long to short, it was for many reasons, and one of those reasons was because of a woman. That was my big mistake. I thought she would be impressed if I had long hair because she always told me that she was more interested in men's hair than her own ; one of those short-haired women I was speaking about in the paragraph above. 

Since I realised that the relationship was not progressing, I made the decision to shear off all my hair. I did not want anything to remind me of her, or how I felt about her. It was impossible to rip out my heart and throw it away, so the next best thing was to get rid of something connected with memories of her.  

The mistake for men and women is to grow their hair longer, or to make it shorter, to please their partner. This is true if you are the sensitive type, who, unfortunately, tries to do everything to make the other person happy, and the other person does..........well......nothing for you.  

 I truly cannot say if I will allow my hair to grow longer. Everything still feels so immediate and because of who I am, I know it will take a long time to find complete peace from the memory of "her". Occasionally, I will look at my hair and have a positive thought about it. Ironically, I still have all my head hair and it's still of good quality and quite thick.   

Changing hairstyle is easy. Changing attitude about relationships with people is more difficult, but it must be done. We live our lives for ourselves, and no matter what a partner thinks, now I believe that people must change their hairstyle only to please themselves, not their partner, or friend, or anyone else. A partner may share the joy and pleasure of your long hair, but who is left with all the pain when the relationship ends? You. Men need to understand this better......including me.