Around the Web – How Dating Works When You’re a Bald Woman

Snippet from the article:

Besides the odd proposition, dating is getting to know someone from the ground up. It’s sharing the deepest secrets about your childhood and family and bathroom habits. But above all, it’s about being hyper vigilant about your appearance. And that’s the crux of the unpleasantness for me: a huge part of dating is about making yourself appear attractive enough for someone to want to spend time with you and potentially have sex with you — a task that is, in my experience, fraught with feelings of anxiety, deception and fear.

I’ve been bald from an autoimmune condition called alopecia areata for most of my dating career. The condition causes your immune system to mistake your hair follicles for foreign bacteria, halting the normal hair growth cycle and resulting in bald patches (alopecia areata), the loss of all scalp hair (alopecia totalis), or the complete loss of all body hair (alopecia universalis). Alopecia affects around two per cent of the Australian population, which is close to half a million people. I’ve experienced alternating periods of complete baldness to having a full head of hair, but for the past three years I’ve had no head hair, no eyebrows and have lost most of my eyelashes.

It makes dating hard. Particularly as a young woman — someone whose physical appearance is weighted above all else as her most defining and valued characteristic.

Read the rest — How dating works when you’re a bald woman

This is a great article by Michelle Law as she talks about how life in the dating scene can be a challenge when you’ve got alopecia. Bald women should not be made to feel alienated.