The night my BF told me he’d end our relationship if I dyed my dark brown hair a slightly warmer shade of red, I laughed because I was certain he had to be joking. Then I asked him twice more, and each time, without hesitation, Jason said the same thing: “Yes, Emily. I’d break up with you.” It took me another week to understand that the argument was never really about my hair.
Chapter 2
I read Jason’s message sitting in my car outside the salon while late-afternoon sunlight poured through the windshield and turned my hair exactly the color I’d hoped for. It wasn’t bright or outrageous. The auburn simply warmed the brown, making my eyes look greener and my skin less washed out.
For the first time in years, I loved looking at my own hair.
Yet instead of enjoying it, I was sitting there negotiating whether my boyfriend would tolerate it.
I called him.
“What does ‘how long’ mean?”
Jason sighed. “Emily, don’t start.”
“I’m not starting. You said you’d break up with me if I dyed it. I dyed it.”
“I was joking.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“Jesus. You’re taking everything literally.”
“I asked you three times.”
“And you kept pushing me.”
“So your answer wasn’t really your answer?”
“I was annoyed.”
“Okay. Then tell me now.”
“Tell you what?”
“Are you leaving?”
He was silent.
I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. Something about the absurdity finally made me smile.
“Jason, nobody is forcing you to date me. If reddish-brown hair destroys your attraction to me, you’re free to go.”
“I’m not saying you’re completely unattractive.”
My smile vanished.
“What?”
“You asked how I feel.”
“No. I asked if you’re ending the relationship.”
“Why are women always asking questions when they don’t actually want honest answers?”
I laughed then, but there was no humor in it.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For making this easy.”
I ended the call.
Jason called back immediately.
I didn’t answer.
He called again.
Then came the messages.
You’re being dramatic.
This is exactly what I mean.
Can we act like adults?
You’re really ending a relationship because I don’t like your hair?
That last one almost impressed me.
Somehow, in less than an hour, Jason had transformed his threat to leave me over hair dye into my decision to end our relationship because he didn’t like my hair.
I put the phone facedown and drove home.
Twenty minutes later, I stopped at a little vintage store I had avoided for months because Jason hated shopping there. In the window hung a rust-colored scarf patterned with tiny gold flowers.
I bought it.
Then I went home and opened my closet.
For the next hour, I pulled things out.
Bright scarves. Silver bracelets. Long skirts. Beaded earrings. My green velvet jacket. The embroidered tunic from Santa Fe.
It felt ridiculous that clothes could make me emotional, but I cried sitting on the bedroom floor.
I remembered myself before Jason.
Not some wildly different woman, just a freer one.
I had always loved color. I liked farmers markets, old records, roadside antique shops, live bluegrass, pottery fairs, and clothes that looked as though they had stories.
Jason didn’t forbid those things.
He simply treated them as embarrassing.
And without noticing, I had begun editing myself.
I changed the music when he got into my car.
I stopped wearing jewelry he called “too much.”
I left bright dresses hanging untouched because I didn’t want to see his expression.
I had thought compromise meant being considerate.
Now I wondered when consideration had become erasure.
The next morning, Jason showed up at my house.
I almost didn’t let him in.
He stood on the porch wearing jeans, work boots, and a black T-shirt that exposed the tattoo sleeve covering his right arm. Roses, skulls, lettering, an enormous eagle, and the portrait of a dog he’d once owned stretched from wrist to shoulder.
He’d gotten part of that sleeve while we were dating.
He had not asked my permission.
“Can we talk?” he said.
I stepped aside.
Jason looked at my hair beneath the kitchen lights.
“It’s not as bad as the picture.”
“That’s quite the compliment.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, actually, I don’t.”
He sat across from me at the table.
“I think this got blown out of proportion.”
“By whom?”
“Both of us.”
I folded my hands.
“Jason, if you’d said, ‘Red hair isn’t my favorite,’ there would’ve been no argument.”
“That’s basically what I said.”
“No. You said you’d end our relationship.”
“I was trying to make a point.”
“What point?”
“That attraction matters.”
I looked at the tattoo on his forearm.
“Remember when you got the eagle?”
“What about it?”
“You told me the day before your appointment.”
“So?”
“I didn’t love the design.”
His eyebrows rose. “You never said that.”
“Because it’s your arm.”
He stared at me.
“I thought it was too large. I thought the wings looked crowded with everything else. But you loved it, and seeing you excited mattered more to me than whether I would’ve picked it.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“It just is.”
“No, Jason. It’s different because you believe your body belongs to you and mine is something we vote on.”
His face reddened.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
I told him about the clothes.
The earrings.
The haircut he’d vetoed.
The piercing.
The music.
At first, he denied remembering some of it. Then he defended others. Eventually his expression became irritated.
“Couples influence each other.”
“Of course they do.”
“You make it sound sinister.”
“I don’t think you’re some cartoon villain. I think you got comfortable believing that your preferences should become my rules.”
He leaned back.
“So what? I’m supposed to just smile if you make yourself unattractive?”
“You don’t have to smile.”
“Then what do you want?”
I thought about it.
“I want to be with someone who can dislike a choice I make without punishing me for making it.”
Jason stood.
“I can’t believe you’re throwing us away.”
There it was again.
Me.
Throwing us away.
I rose too.
“No. I’m deciding I don’t want to spend the next ten years asking whether every haircut, dress, song, and piece of jewelry meets your approval.”
“That’s not fair.”
I nearly laughed.
“You threatened to break up with me over hair dye.”
“Because my ex—”
He stopped.
The sentence broke off so suddenly that I noticed.
“Your ex what?”
“Nothing.”
“Jason.”
He looked toward the window.
“Forget it.”
His long-term relationship before me had ended only a few months before we’d met. He rarely talked about her. I knew her name was Melissa, that they’d been together nearly six years, and that she’d been the one to leave.
That evening, curiosity got the better of me.
I searched her name online.
Her profile wasn’t private.
The first photograph stopped me cold.
Melissa was standing beside a lake, laughing beneath a wide-brimmed hat.
Her hair was red.
Not auburn-brown like mine.
Bright, unmistakable copper red.
I scrolled farther.
Nearly every photograph taken during the last year of her relationship with Jason showed the same red hair.
Then I found a picture posted two weeks after their breakup.
Melissa was wearing a flowing purple dress, several necklaces, and a tiny silver nose ring.
The caption said:
Turns out remembering who you were before someone spent years telling you who to be feels pretty good.
I sat back slowly.
My hair had not created Jason’s behavior.
It had exposed a pattern he had already practiced on someone else.
And if I stayed, I suspected I knew exactly where that pattern led.
