When our COVID quarantine began in March, I was cautious about having my wife Jenny cut my hair. While I eventually let my guard down and trusted her, she immediately dismissed my offer to cut her hair and instead waited two months for the salon to re-open.
I get it.
It’s obviously different for women and men. Plus, the stakes are higher for her. She’s on video conference calls every day for work and I no longer interact with adults.
Even with reduced stakes, I was hesitant to let Jenny cut my hair. The only tools we had were a beard trimmer, comb and questionably sharp scissors.
For the first cut, I refused to allow her to go anywhere lower than the top setting on my beard trimmer. She insisted that she needed to use it unguarded around the ears and – well – let’s just say I ended up finishing that haircut myself.
A month later, we both admitted to a few mistakes and I gave her a little more leeway. Until I took the clippers back to finish cleaning up and managed to break the guard mid-cut.
It was a long three weeks until my replacement clippers arrived (well, technically only long on one side above the ear).
The new clippers work so well I canceled my summer haircuts and plan to continue cutting my hair at home for the foreseeable future.
Adopting the home haircut has been a callback to my childhood but in reverse. Why is that when a little kid gets a haircut he suddenly seems so much older but when an adult gets a haircut, he suddenly seems so much younger?
I literally grew up getting bowl haircuts because it was the 1980s and my mother had three boys within four years of each other.
She didn’t have time to personalize our appearances and liked The Beatles too much to give us buzzcuts so every few weeks she’d drag out her silver scissors and a wooden salad bowl to permanently scar our lives.
Finally making the leap to professional barbers was a big deal in my household.
I found it nearly impossible not to laugh when they took the electric razor to my neck or ears as a kid since it tickles. This was troubling because I have that bowl-full-of-jello laugh Santa Claus is known for and really shouldn’t laugh when electric razors are near me.
Wanting not to laugh only made me more aware of how likely I was to laugh, which created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We stopped going to that barber after he gave us all lice, which was probably the right call.
After that, we went to a place in the mall with hairstylists instead of barbers. The only difference I could tell was that I was no longer allowed to make funny faces at myself in the mirror the whole time.
Instead, she’d turn me away during the haircut to do a big reveal at the end, spinning me back to the mirror. I never knew what to say but I could feel her desperation hanging on me like a wet hair on the side of the shower.
This was only compounded by her holding a hand mirror up behind my head so I could “see the back.” Yep, that’s still my head, thanks.
Haircuts are strange. They’re the only sort of grooming I habitually do with another person.
Our honeymoon package included a couple’s massage and we sent my wife twice. This isn’t some masculine puffed-out-chest posturing, I simply don’t like other people in my personal space.
I embraced this about myself a long time ago. When my nieces or nephews go around giving everyone a kiss goodnight, I look them right in their adorable little faces and say, “no thanks.”
I was social distancing before social distancing was cool.
That’s why I’m not rushing back to the barbershop.
Even though Jenny felt perfectly safe and satisfied with her post-COVID haircut, I know it would make me uncomfortable.
If anything I dread the conversation more than the experience. How do you make small talk with someone through a mirror while you’re both wearing masks and trying to pretend it’s not incredibly weird?
If I’m going to go through all of that, it has to be with someone I really trust. Even if I still won’t let her trim around the ears.
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