The Hair Situation

I've been thinking about the fridge thing lately.

You know the one. You walk to the refrigerator, open it, stand there for a full ten seconds like you're waiting for a divine revelation, then close it having achieved nothing. You weren't even hungry. You just .. went. Some internal process issued a command, and your body obeyed without asking questions.

My brain does something similar with hair.

Not one specific kind. Not a single fixed template. More like a whole quiet taxonomy of beauty that my brain assembled, without permission, over the course of a lifetime — and has been updating ever since, in the background, like software I never asked to install.

Let me try to explain.

There's the long, thick black hair with a slight curl. That's the one that started everything. Not aggressive curl, not pin-straight either — just enough wave to suggest that nature and effort reached a peaceful agreement somewhere around the third wash of the week. When it moves, it moves like it has an opinion about where it's going. When I see it, something in me goes oh. Quietly. Completely. The way a key turns in a lock you forgot you had.

Then there's the short wavy hair. And this one is different — softer, somehow. Less arrival, more home. There's something about short wavy hair that makes the world feel oddly safe, like you've just stepped inside somewhere warm and the rain is doing its thing on the other side of the glass. I can't explain the logic of that. I'm not sure logic is the right tool for the job.

And then — the shoulder-length. Thick, full, landing just where the neck meets the collarbone. This is the one that makes you want to hug the person. Not romantically, necessarily — just genuinely. Like your arms receive a suggestion from somewhere deep in your nervous system and the suggestion says this person could use a hug, or possibly you could, and honestly let's not overthink which one it is.

Each of these is its own thing. Each does something slightly different to my internal weather.

I don't know exactly when all this started. Somewhere in childhood, between discovering that fractions were real and unavoidable, and learning that adults don't actually know what they're doing either, my brain held a private meeting and made several long-term commitments on my behalf. No memo was sent. No vote was taken. It just happened, the way most important things happen — quietly, behind your back, while you were distracted by something else entirely.

What's strange isn't that the preferences exist. Everyone has them. Some people feel inexplicably at ease around people who wear glasses. Some are constitutionally incapable of resisting a deep laugh. Some fall slightly in love with every person who owns too many plants and names each one individually, which is, I think, the most endearing and slightly unhinged preference of all.

Mine just happens to be hair.

In multiple forms, apparently. A whole quiet collection of them.

And the collection has been suspiciously consistent.

I've even tried to explain it scientifically, the way you do when you want something absurd to feel respectable. Evolutionary psychology, I tell myself confidently. Indicators of health. Signals of vitality. Well-kept hair probably meant something, once, to some version of our ancestors navigating a much harder world. The slight curl is the Switzerland of hairstyles — optimal, balanced, neither declaring war nor surrendering. The short waves carry their own signal: ease, confidence, someone who knows what works for them and isn't waiting for your approval. The shoulder-length thickness is, biologically speaking, abundance made visible.

This is, of course, an elaborate justification for something I have absolutely no control over.

The real answer is both simpler and more embarrassing: my brain saw these things, at various points in time, said yes, and yes, and also yes, and has refused to revisit any of those decisions.

The reaction itself is the part I can't fully account for.

It isn't just appreciation. Appreciation would be manageable, even dignified. This is something closer to involuntary narration — a sudden sense that whatever's happening around you has briefly become a scene. The long curly hair and your internal monologue, previously occupied with whether you left the stove on and if oat milk is actually fine or secretly terrible, simply pivots. Completely. Without warning.

The short wavy hair walks by and something loosens in your chest — the specific tension you carry around cities and crowds and too many people wanting too many things. It just... releases. For a second. Like someone opened a window in a room you'd forgotten was stuffy.

The shoulder-length hair, thick and easy, and your first instinct isn't romantic at all. It's almost protective. Or maybe you're the one who wants protecting. These things are hard to tell apart, and perhaps that's the point.

Meanwhile, all these women are just going somewhere. Getting on with their Tuesdays. Completely unaware they have each triggered, in some nearby stranger, a small and wordless reorganization.

The humbling part isn't the attraction. It's the disproportion of it.

And then there's the other side. Because preferences, as it turns out, are not just soft warm things. They have edges.

The same brain that assembles quiet awe at a specific curl pattern will, confronted with hair that doesn't fit any of its internal categories, simply... close the tab. Not cruelly. Not with deliberate judgment. Just a silent no, the way you close a door without slamming it.

This is not entirely fair. I'm aware it's not fair. The whole system was built without consultation, running on criteria I didn't write and can't fully audit.

But there it is. Running anyway.

The more interesting question isn't why the preferences exist. It's what you do once you know they do.

Because here's what I've learned, slowly and with some embarrassment: the woman with the long curling hair might be quietly unkind in ways that compound over time. The short wavy hair might belong to someone mid-crisis, held together by good dry shampoo and sheer will. The shoulder-length thickness might frame a face that's currently, gently, somewhere else entirely.

And somewhere, in a room my brain never quite lit up for, there's a person whose hair I might have scrolled past — whose laugh, whose way of listening, whose strange and specific kindness would have, if I'd been paying different attention, reorganized everything.

The algorithm doesn't know any of this. It's working from limited data, collected long ago, under conditions that no longer fully apply.

Which is, if you think about it, how most of our certainties operate.

I've stopped trying to override it, mostly. That seems like the kind of project that sounds admirable in theory and just makes you confused and vaguely resentful in practice. Better to know it's there — to see it running — and hold it loosely. Ah yes, there's that thing again. Notice it. Maybe even appreciate it a little. Then stay curious about what else might be true.

Because you can feel the pull of the long curled hair and still ask more questions. You can feel the world go briefly safer at the sight of short waves and still remain skeptical of your own ease. You can want to hug the shoulder-length thickness and still understand that you don't actually know anything about who that person is, what they carry, what they need, or whether they'd find you interesting for longer than a Tuesday afternoon.

The preference isn't the problem. Mistaking it for knowledge — that's the problem.

People are not the sum of their hair. I know this. My brain is still, patiently, catching up.

There's no resolution here. I want to be upfront about that. Someone will walk by, sometime soon — long and curling, or short and wavy, or thick and settling softly at the shoulder — and my internal narrator will wake up mid-sentence and start doing its thing, and I will be, briefly, a little ridiculous.

And then I'll go home. Open the fridge. Stand there staring into it like it owes me an answer.

Close the door.

Walk away.

As if I had the math for any of this.