“If you dye your hair red, I’m breaking up with you.” I stared at the message on my phone, waiting for the little laughing emoji that would turn the sentence into a joke. None came. Instead, three dots appeared, disappeared, and appeared again while I sat alone at my kitchen table wondering how a conversation about hair had suddenly become a threat to my relationship.
Chapter 1
Twenty minutes earlier, everything between Ryan and me had been normal. We had been texting about the movie we’d seen the previous weekend, laughing about a scene we both loved, when I mentioned how beautiful I thought the actress’s dark auburn hair looked. It wasn’t bright red or anything dramatic. It was deep brown with a warm wine-colored tint that mostly showed when the light hit it.
“I might do something like that,” I wrote. “I used to have reddish-brown hair years ago, and I loved it.”
His answer came almost immediately.
“Don’t.”
At first, I thought he was teasing. Ryan had a dry sense of humor, and after eight months together, I was used to short messages that sounded harsher on a screen than he intended. I sent back a laughing face.
“Why not?”
“Because I hate dyed hair.”
I looked at the words for a long moment. My natural hair was almost black, thick and wavy, and the color I wanted wouldn’t have required bleach. I had already looked at pictures online and knew it would probably appear brown indoors and reveal a soft red tone outside.
“You hate all dyed hair?”
“Yes.”
“So you’d hate mine?”
“I wouldn’t like it.”
I should have stopped there. People were allowed to have preferences, and I knew that. Ryan didn’t have to love every dress I wore, every haircut I chose, or every decision I made about my appearance.
But something about his tone bothered me.
So I typed, “Would you actually break up with me if I dyed it?”
“Yes.”
I laughed out loud because the alternative was believing him.
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Ryan, you would end an eight-month relationship because my dark brown hair had a little red in it?”
“If you did it knowing I hated it, yeah.”
I read that sentence three times.
Ryan was thirty-three. I was thirty-one. We were not teenagers fighting over prom pictures. We had talked about moving in together once my lease ended. We had taken a weekend trip to Santa Fe, spent Thanksgiving with his sister’s family, and discussed whether either of us wanted children someday.
Yet apparently all of that could disappear over a bottle of hair color.
I called him.
He declined the call.
That hurt more than I expected.
“Can we please talk instead of texting?” I wrote.
“No point. I told you how I feel.”
I sat back in my chair.
Outside my apartment window, Denver was turning gold in the late afternoon. The mountains looked purple in the distance, and normally I would have stood there admiring them. Instead, I kept staring at my phone.
Finally, I typed, “That feels incredibly superficial. I’m not talking about changing my face. I’m talking about a subtle hair color.”
His response made my stomach twist.
“So I should be able to cover my face in crazy tattoos and you’re not allowed to lose attraction to me?”
I almost laughed again, except this time there was nothing funny about it.
Ryan already had tattoos. Lots of them. One covered most of his left forearm. Another stretched across his shoulder. Two months earlier, he had come home from a weekend trip with his brother sporting a new six-inch tattoo on his ribs.
He hadn’t asked me whether I approved.
I hadn’t expected him to.
His body belonged to him.
“That’s not remotely the same thing,” I wrote.
“It’s exactly the same. Attraction matters.”
“So does kindness.”
No answer came.
I waited an hour.
Then two.
By bedtime, he still hadn’t responded.
I slept badly and woke before sunrise with the strange sensation that something much bigger had happened than an argument about hair.
At work, I could barely concentrate. I was an event coordinator for a nonprofit arts center, and that morning I was supposed to finalize seating plans for a fundraising dinner. Instead, I kept remembering little conversations with Ryan that had seemed harmless at the time.
A month after we started dating, I wore a long floral skirt to brunch.
Ryan looked me up and down before we left my apartment.
“That’s kind of a lot, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“The whole hippie thing.”
I laughed because I thought he was kidding.
Before Ryan, that “hippie thing” had been my favorite way to dress. Flowing skirts. Turquoise rings. Colorful scarves. Handmade earrings I bought at street fairs. My mother used to joke that I dressed like I was permanently on my way to a folk festival.
Over the months, I had started wearing more jeans, neutral sweaters and simple jewelry.
I told myself my taste was changing.
Then I remembered the time I mentioned growing my hair down to my waist.
“That would look gross,” Ryan had said. “Like one of those women who never cuts it.”
Another time, I considered cutting it to my shoulders.
“No, don’t do that either. Your hair looks better the way it is.”
Then there had been the small silver nose stud I admired at a jewelry store.
He laughed.
“You’re not seriously thinking about putting that in your face.”
Ryan had an eyebrow piercing when he was younger. He had recently talked about getting his ear pierced again.
I hadn’t connected any of it.
Not until now.
That evening, my friend Melissa came over with Thai food and found me sitting cross-legged on the couch with my phone beside me.
She listened while I explained the argument. I expected her to tell me Ryan had overreacted but that couples said stupid things sometimes.
Instead, she put down her fork.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“When did you stop wearing those giant silver earrings?”
I frowned. “What?”
“The ones you bought in Santa Fe before you met him. You loved those.”
“I don’t know.”
“And that orange embroidered jacket?”
I shrugged. “Ryan thought it looked strange.”
Melissa studied me.
“When was the last time we went dancing?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You used to drag me out.”
“I’m thirty-one now, Mel. People change.”
“Absolutely.” She leaned back. “But did you change because you wanted to?”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
She softened.
“I’m not telling you what to do. I’m asking whether this is really the first time he has tried to decide what you should look like.”
That night, after Melissa left, I opened the storage bin beneath my bed.
Inside were pieces of myself I had quietly packed away.
Bright scarves. Handmade jewelry. A mustard-yellow cardigan Ryan once called “grandma clothes.” A pair of red cowboy boots I had worn constantly before he said they made me look ridiculous.
I sat on the bedroom floor holding one of those boots.
My phone buzzed.
Finally, Ryan.
“You done being mad yet?”
I stared at the message.
Then another came.
“Because this whole thing is getting dramatic over nothing.”
Over nothing.
I typed slowly.
“If it’s nothing, why would you break up with me over it?”
He replied almost immediately.
“Because if you know your boyfriend hates something and you do it anyway, that says something about you.”
My heart started pounding.
“And what does it say about you if you threaten to leave me unless I look the way you want?”
For several minutes, there was silence.
Then his answer appeared.
“You’re twisting this around.”
I set the phone facedown.
For the first time since I met Ryan, I wondered whether the problem was not that he disliked red hair.
I wondered whether the problem was that he disliked any version of me he hadn’t approved.
