So my girlfriend shaved her head. What’s a guy to do?

Her name is Aymi. She, too, writes for the Iowa State Daily, and this summer she is a copy editor. Maybe it’s wrong to hire one’s girlfriend, but she is qualified since she is an English whiz.

She had been wanting to shave her head since before we started going out. I met her in Nancy Blyler’s argumentative writing class last fall (English 318). In that class we sat next to each other and talked — because she sure can talk — but after class we’d part ways, so we never went out.

The next semester, she began writing for the Daily, and I, as her editor, was impressed by her involvement in various activities around school. But then she told me that she planned to shave her head. Hmm.

But I thought, “Hey, she can do what she wants.”

Before long, though, I somehow convinced her to go out with oh-so-lonely me. This was back in February. I learned she didn’t want to shave her head until May because she was a bridesmaid in a wedding.

So between then and now she kept her long, straight, brown hair. She’d tell people about her intent to shave it off and they’d say, “Oh, please no, don’t do that.” John Scriver, a long-haired communist graduate student in sociology from Knapp St., was the worst. Hair meant a lot to this man, and he hated to see beautiful Aymi lose all that hair.

So on May 17, Aymi did the bridesmaid thing, and on May 19 she was leaving for Ireland. So on the night of May 18, I agreed to shave her head for her. Back in February, I never would have guessed that I would be the person to cut off all that long hair. But I did have experience with clippers from when I was in the Army — like it really takes any skill to shave a head, anyway.

I began buzzing, and hair fell to the floor. When I was done, I put the Barbasol on her head and shaved her with my own razor until she was bald.

She’s back from Ireland now and everyone’s freaking out about her head. Its just a woman without hair. Big deal. We walk into Burger King, and little girls gawk at her. People everywhere do double takes.

At the Des Moines airport, when Aymi came back from Ireland, her parents got their first view of her bald head.

Her father said he thought he was a bad father and wondered why she rebelled against everything he taught her. I told him that she wasn’t rebelling, she was just being different and independent. Her mother was shocked at first, but to tell the truth, they both took it well and still love her as much as before.

My mother thought it was cool, but my whole family is weird anyway, including me, so her reaction only makes sense.

It is amazing how when someone has long hair, it becomes so prized that it is a social taboo to shorten it. Perhaps this is because beautiful long hair takes some time to grow, and they feel it should be displayed for all to see. But Aymi was just sick of long hair, and she thought she’d just get rid of all of it. She said she could grow it all back out if she wanted to.

She also said she wanted to know that people loved her for more than her beauty. She figured that if she dated people, she’d have a better idea if they liked her if they didn’t mind her lack of hair. She never put that theory to the test, though, because we started go out. Now we live in Slater — living together, another social taboo about which Chris Miller, former editor in chief, used to flip us crap.

So my girlfriend shaved her head. What’s a guy to do?

Well, he kisses her on her bald head. He rubs her stubble when the hair grows out and helps her to shave it back off on Sunday nights. He supports her and keeps right on loving her. Maybe he even gets a kick out of the way people react to her baldness.

But most of all, he remembers he loves her not only for her physical beauty, but for her internal beauty. And with Aymi, she still looks very beautiful, if not more so, with a shaved head.

And I have to admire her individuality. I get tired of same old conventions and admire it when someone doesn’t act like another sheep in the herd.

And John Scriver doesn’t have to worry because we saved him a braided lock of Aymi’s hair since he was so concerned about her hair.

Now the next question: So my girlfriend is letting the hair on her legs grow. What’s a guy to do?

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Tim Frerking is a senior in journalism and mass communications from Pomeroy. He is the summer editor in chief of the Daily.