Dear Abby: LW prefers just one blond

[cereta]

DEAR ABBY: My girlfriend bleached her hair blond for a special event, but recently changed it back to her natural black color. She turned me on even more as a blonde, but I'm not sure how to tell her. Would I be out of line to ask her to go blond again for me? -- LIKES HER BLOND IN NEW YORK

DEAR LIKES HER BLOND: The time for you to have raved about how much you liked her "new look" was before she went back to her natural color. For someone to go from dark to blond, then dark to blond again can be damaging to the hair -- not to mention expensive to maintain.

You can ask, I suppose. But she may not be willing to go along with it. And if that's the case, you're just going to have to love her the way God made her.

P.S. You could buy her a blond wig to wear on "special occasions."

Comments

[cereta]

Oh, good. I was perplexed by the seeming fraughtness of the whole thing.

[recessional]

I guess maybe . . . *squints at it, pokes* I suppose I have vaguely run into circles where "my boyfriend likes this" = "this is something I have to do in order to keep boyfriend", now that I think about it? They don't leap to mind because frankly I find them alien, but I have run into them.

So if he and Abby are both working from THAT model - one where for weird and fucked up reasons the request puts a HUGE IMPOSITION on girlfriend - then maybe it makes sense?

. . . I dunno, as I said, I find that entire CONCEPT of relationships so alien that I have no idea where the norms and lines run, now that I think about it. But it does exist, because now that I've thought about it I have had a number of conversations that more or less run:

"UGH, [random grooming or appearance-altering thing] is THE WORST."
" . . . so stop doing it?"
"I can't, my boyfriend likes [whatever]."
" . . . . ? But you hate it. So stop doing it."
"I can't do that."

[kaberett]

It's not being expected to be a request that can not be complied with with no harm done - it's expected to be a coded demand, and on top of that it's one that's parsed as "you as you are are not good enough". Where worth and contribution to a relationship is determined by attractiveness, "you're hotter with blonde hair" turns into "your purpose is to be attractive to me, all that determines this is your physical appearance, and you're not good enough without putting in significant effort".

(Shorthand because not proper keyboard.)

[azurelunatic]

There's also the possibility of racial aspects; sometimes "I find blonde girls more attractive" contains "I find white girls more attractive".

[recessional]

Yeah, like that part I do get, it's just because my entire gut-reaction to that is "what the fucking fuck why are you even WITH this person?" it's hard to gauge what kind of comments are or aren't going to fall under that.

[cereta]

I've run into that, too, which may be the paradigm people are seeing. I suppose I'm just so accustomed to people opining on my many-varied hair colors that it doesn't occur to me to see them as anything but just that: opinions. But that's my experience. I still think the comments at uexpress are more than a little pearl-clutching, especially over the wig suggestion.

[recessional]

I also think that social/cultural mode is, like, so unbelievably toxic that . . . words fail me, so even if that is the source of the pearl-clutching it's still messed up because we should be dismantling this, and you can't dismantle while endorsing. :P

[kaberett]

Oh yeah absolutely agreed :-p

[jadelennox]

Yeah, I was like, "hey, partner, that time you grew a bear was wicked hot!" And partner was like, "haha too bad because I hated the damn thing" and it wasn't fraught at all. Except man I wish he would grow a beard because it was hot.

[vass]

"hey, partner, that time you grew a bear was wicked hot!"

The best typo I have seen all week. I'm sure your partner looked great with a bear growing out of him, but I can certainly see how inconvenient it might have been for him.