Why I Cut Off My Beautiful Hair

And why I want to grow it back again

“Cut it off,” I said, looking at her in the mirror with a resolute expression on my face.

She took a step back as if I’d slapped her. She’d been trimming my hair so carefully for the past three years so I could grow it out and now it was almost down to my waist. “Are you sure?” She looked worried.

“Do it,” I said, with absolute certainty.

I only cried a little when the first strand of hair — nearly 9 inches long — fell to the floor beneath me. It was time for a fresh start.

When a man leaves a woman for a younger partner, it creates a particularly nasty wound — a wound that doesn’t stop bleeding for a very long time. It’s especially difficult when the woman is the older person in the relationship and already insecure about the age difference.

I was nearly 40 when my ex left — he was not yet 30. His new girlfriend that he quite literally ran away with was barely old enough to buy liquor.

In the beginning, he had loved our age difference. He’d always had a thing for older women, he told me.

But in the last few years of our relationship, I found that our age difference was not as attractive to him as it had once been. When we’d have talks about his commitment phobia and where our relationship was going, sometimes he would impatiently say, “Look, I just always thought I’d marry someone younger, okay?”

I never told him how much it hurt my feelings when he commented about his desire to be with someone younger. He hadn’t felt that way at the beginning of our relationship and it almost felt like he was resentful about it later on, as if somehow, I’d cheated him out of something. Surely he must have realized that I was going to get older first.

But maybe it didn’t really hit him until my 40th birthday loomed on the horizon. That certainly wasn’t the reason he left — but I can imagine that having his 20-something, conservative, traditional friends who had all married younger women, razz him about his live-in lover of 40 was probably not something he was looking forward to.

Women deal with enormous societal pressure around their looks. Even to this day, the media scrutinizes our weight, hair color, sartorial style, and yes, our age.

Personally, it took me years to even begin to disengage from the all-consuming obsession of my eating and exercise disorders. And I still struggle with body dysmorphic disorder.

So imagine how it felt to approach 40 in a culture that shames the process of aging — especially for women. Add to that the fact that I hadn’t accomplished the objective I was “supposed” to accomplish: marriage and motherhood.

And then imagine watching your partner of seven years run off with a girlfriend who is almost half your age.

My beauty, my worth, my sexuality… It was gone. All of it. Like someone had cut me open with a dull knife, pulverizing everything in its path, dumping out my insides onto the floor in a gory, wet, slippery mess, and leaving me there, hollow, gaping, and ripped apart.

Yeah, it felt that violent.

I didn’t bother arguing with myself that I was beautiful on the inside, or that his leaving could not affect my worth or sexuality. At the time, there was no possible way to see anything but a hideous old lady who would never get fucked again.

I literally didn’t even feel like a woman anymore. Just an ugly shell with nothing inside.

I wanted to, though. I wanted my femininity back. I wanted to feel like a woman again. I even dared to want to feel pretty again, even knowing it was impossible.

One day, I finally figured out how to do it — my hair.

I’ve always had a difficult relationship with my hair. As a child, though I had the classic California blonde gifted to me from all the hours I spent in the L.A. sunshine and of course from my Scandinavian genes, it was so fine, my mother always had it cut in a shag. I didn’t really like the style, but I didn’t want to argue with her, so I let it go, even though my sister, not at all afraid to fight with our mother, demanded to have long hair — a look she’s had most of her life.

I got so used to having short hair that even as an adult, I almost never let it grow past my shoulders.

But suddenly, I got it into my head that having long hair might make me beautiful again. Feminine. Maybe, I thought, I would feel like a woman again if I just had long hair, like Guinevere or Morgan le Fey.

Longer and longer and longer it got over the years — longer than I had ever had it before.

And though I loved it long, it didn’t make me feel more feminine. It didn’t make me feel more beautiful. It didn’t ease the pain of being left for a younger woman.

Only time and getting my good sense back would do that.

When I signed my mortgage papers in 2017 and they gave me the keys to my new house — the first house I’d ever owned — I knew I had to do one thing before moving in.

I had to cut my hair.

I’m a firm believer that we carry energy in our bodies and our possessions. I was already in the process of getting rid of items I had kept from our old house together.

Looking in the mirror one night, I knew that my hair was filled with an energy I didn’t want in my new life, in my new house. It was filled with the sorrow and loss of the past three years. It was filled with my self-doubt. It was a representation of my heartbreak and lack of confidence in myself.

I had survived. I had bought a house all by myself. And I wanted that house to be untouched by my past, untouched by that heartbreak.

So the hair had to go.

Funnily enough, because my hair had gotten so long, few people even noticed when I cut off nine inches.

“Half my hair is gone!” I’d exclaim to people again and again.

But they’d shake their head and insist it didn’t look that different.

It felt different, though. I felt lighter — both physically and emotionally. In fact, I felt jubilant to remove that sadness from my body. Jubilant to move into my home and start fresh.

In the two years that I’ve lived here, though, I’ve kept cutting my hair shorter and shorter to see how much I wanted to let go. Last summer, on a particularly hot day nearing the 100 degree mark, I went into my bathroom and chopped off three more inches in frustration.

But I hated it. It was just at my shoulders for the first time in nearly ten years. I missed the length I’d once had. In fact…I realized I missed it being really long.

I’m ready to grow it back again — not down to my waist, but maybe to the middle of my back. I do miss the way it fell over my shoulders. I miss the long braids I used to wear. I miss it peeking out from beneath my winter hats.

Yes, I want to grow it back again. But this time for me. Not because I’m afraid I’m old and ugly and sexually irrelevant and long hair is the only way I can correct that. Not because I’m still heartbroken (I’m not). Not because I want to attract a new partner.

I want to do it just for me.

© Yael Wolfe 2020