The Tamesis
I’ve been through the ordeal of breakups many times in my life, and I think I’ve made all the attendant bad life decisions you can make when dealing with lingering heartbreak and rejection, including crying to my mom on the phone, listening to totally ill-advised mitskis, and occasionally going home with strangers (as all adventurous women do!). However, when my nearly four-year relationship—the longest relationship I’d ever had, in which we lived together and shared a dog—came to an end this fall, I realized that all the breakup pain I’d experienced before was child’s play. this This is the real pain of a relationship breakup, and it requires the heaviest cannon in the newly single girl’s arsenal: bangs.
To be fair, it did take some time between the end of my relationship and the time I sat in a salon chair in Los Feliz and showed my hairstylist a reference photo of Dakota Johnson’s bob and bangs — specifically: three and a half months — but oddly enough, that haircut was my biggest act of breakup rebellion; my ex-boyfriend always suggested it to me Don’t wear bangs because “you’re going to hate having them and you’re just going to feel stressed out having them pinned every day.” While he was absolutely not wrong, I felt a “fuck you, I’m not going to do what you tell me” energy flowing through me that day in the salon that was quite inconsistent with my ex and my extremely amicable, friendship-style breakup. Yes, we’re still close, but… I’m not the same person I was when we were together, and what better way to prove it than with a semi-reckless crisis haircut?
“The first time I got bangs was after a relationship ended,” says Kelsey, 37. “The relationship felt very liberating and I was excited to be more intentional about who I was. But the shape of my hair had been unintentional for a long time. I cut my bangs and immediately felt like I was who I wanted to be in the world, and they worked! I’ve never felt so wanted in a lesbian scene.”
But my hairstylist is in no rush to be complicit in declaring reckless independence over the edge. She sat me down for a serious chat before she raised a pair of scissors and cut my hair, echoing my ex’s concerns about bang maintenance, telling me calmly but firmly that the “do absolutely nothing but tie it up in a bun” style of my life wasn’t the right fit for the look I wanted. “You’re going to have to buy a hair dryer and at least some styling cream,” she advised me, and when I agreed, she ended up giving me a fringed, very vicious little bob that was beyond my wildest dreams. When I got dressed to go out that night, I didn’t feel like a newly single thirtysomething always teetering on the edge of tears; instead, I felt hot, powerful, and (dare I say it?) almost .French?
My breakup bangs story may represent the luckiest of us who choose to take the plunge after a breakup, but it doesn’t represent everyone’s experience. “Lesbian breakups can really destroy you, and after realizing I couldn’t make someone love me again, I wanted to have some control,” Ileana said of her experience breaking up with bangs.
Regardless, Illyana and I are not alone in our hair-centric breakup journey. Nicole Kidman is an authority on self-care for single girls, publicly proving that breakup bangs don’t necessarily spell doom when she showed off her new bangs on the Chanel show last fall, shortly after announcing her split from ex-husband Keith Urban.
