When I first met my husband, I thought his beard was sexy. It was a shadow of stubble, the color of iron filings, giving him a look that was at once tattered and tough. The fact that my husband is neither of these things—he is a chemist and a self-proclaimed Druid—only added to the appeal. I loved my husband’s beard, the way it hovered halfway, how it felt against my skin, both soft and sharp. I came to know his face by the presence and particularities of this beard. I was attracted to him in part because of this beard. It would not be entirely wrong to say I married my husband based on his beard; based on other things too, of course—his humor, his intelligence, his kindness, his quirkiness—but the beard was a factor.
Before we married—while we were courting, that is—my husband took care of his beard. When it started to get fluffy, he trimmed it with a tiny pair of sewing scissors and a black electric razor. But after we married—I don’t know exactly when, a year, maybe two—once we were settled down into domesticity, once our relationship had lost the anxious edge that comes without commitment, he started to let his beard go. He started to let it grow. It came in curls and frizz, and it seemed to spread sideways more than down, making his face look fat. Once during this time he took a business trip, and when I came to pick him up at the airport I was shocked to see him with the clarity that comes from absence. He looked like an old-fashioned lumberjack, or Moses, his lips barely visible, fully fringed with hair. He also appeared crazed. He got into the car, tossing his suitcase in the back.
“How are you?” he said, and he leaned over to kiss me. The beard had a strange smell, a smell familiar but impossible to place, the inside of an old trunk maybe, cedar chips and dust. I flinched and drew away. “What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said, and I hated myself then, hated myself for the lie and also for my superficiality.
We were mostly quiet on the way home. The highway hummed under our wheels, the long ribbon of road unfurling before us, green signs flashing in the headlights and then yanked back into blackness. As we pulled into our driveway, I said, “You know, I think you should cut your beard.”
He pulled on it and smiled. “I kinda like it this way,” he said.
“I don’t think I do. You remind me . . . I mean, you don’t look like my husband. You look . . . avuncular. I really think you should trim it at least.”
“It’s my beard,” he said.
“But I’m the one who kisses it,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a bat flew out of that mess.”
“Cool,” he said. “A bat in my beard. I like it.”
My husband then swung open the car door, bounded up our front steps. The dogs were ecstatic when they saw him. They leapt up, barked, and he funneled his face down close to theirs, tongues slurping, wet noses, and when he looked up, his beard had some slobber on it.
I was grumpy then. Days passed and the grumpiness would not leave. And then, one week later, my husband came home and his beard was gone. Presto. Poof. I had never, ever seen the lower half of his face in plain light before. There it was, stark, white, white, stark, pale, plucked; he looked young, very young, the shaved skin red as a diaper rash. I hate to say it but I yelped. It was as though he had snuck up on me wearing a Halloween mask, only the mask was his actual face, and his actual face was as unfamiliar as a stranger’s.
“You like?” he said.
“Why’d you do that?” I said.
“You asked me to,” he said.
“I said trim your beard, not strip it.”
“I want to try out a beardless identity. I want to pass as a Republican.”
“What,” I said, irritated, “you think a beard is radical? I’m sure the Christian Right has a large bearded base.”
“You know,” he said, “you look a little scared.”
“You should have warned me,” I said. “You don’t look anything like yourself.”
“It’s me,” he said, and of course he was right. It was him, and that was precisely the problem.
Everyone likes to think that looks are secondary in love. We pick our partners for their talents, their brilliance, their ambition, their stature. Sure, we like a handsome man, but we don’t walk the aisle based on a face; we are holistic; we understand beauty is emitted in many ways, and comes in many shapes and sizes. This is what we like to tell ourselves. But in fact, recent studies have shown that human beings tend to favor (i.e., love) the people in their lives who are most attractive. In a 2005 study, researchers at the University of Alberta gathered some disturbing results after hanging out in supermarkets and watching mothers interact with their children. They found that mothers gave more praise and positive reinforcement to their more beautiful children. Other studies have shown that people with conventionally pretty faces are more likely to be picked for job offerings and are more likely to advance up the corporate ladder. In his study on mate selection, psychologist David Buss showed a series of faces to people from Katmandu to Kentucky, and whatever the culture, everyone seemed to agree on which faces were the most attractive. As human beings, we know beauty, and we love beauty. I did not find my beardless husband beautiful. He had no chin.
What happens when the partner we pick gets too fat, or too thin, or too . . . chinless or . . . something? I felt I was falling out of love, or out of attraction. I did not want to have sex with this man. That night we did have sex and it was creepy, the foreign face floating above mine, the moon peeping in our window. I wanted, more than anything, to feel the click of connection, but it wasn’t there. I kept saying to myself, “This is Benjamin, Benjamin, Benjamin,” but it seemed he’d shaved more than his beard; he’d shaved his self. Without his beard, his voice sounded different to me, higher and more hollow, as though he were not quite real, as though a motor ticked inside him. It was a subtle shift. His voice sounded different to me the same way a piano sounds different when it’s slightly out of tune. You keep pressing the note you know, and it keeps coming back at you all the more warped because it has within it the sound of something familiar, but far away. Later that night, when Benjamin was asleep, I got up and pulled out our wedding album. Now there was the man I’d married.
Understand, I wanted to learn to love beardless Benjamin. In fact, I wanted to learn to love and be desirous of my husband in whatever guise he came in. To that end I decided what I needed to do was desensitize myself to his new face, force it into neutrality, whereupon, perhaps, I could learn to love it. I had a whole desperate theory worked out. It went like this: He had shocked me by shaving his beard and not telling me. I now associated his shaven face with shock, discomfort, even fear, and because of these associated emotions, I was bound to think he was ugly. Therefore, I needed to look at him beardless as much as possible. I needed to stare at his face, feel his face, run my fingers over his chinny chin chinlessness, come to recognize the blades of bones that had been hidden beneath his hair. I did this. Over dinner, in bed, I would lay the flat of my hand against him; I would touch him like a blind person, searching for clues, for the familiar . . . oh, it’s you! I went so far as to study his new face beneath a magnifying glass, when he was sleeping, of course, his pores huge, stalks of stubble struggling up through the pocked skin. Oh dear. He woke up. “What are you doing?” he said.
“Studying you,” I said.
“You hate the way I look without a beard,” he said. “I know.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not going to grow it back,” he said. “Not right now.”
“I don’t think I can adjust,” I said. “If I got really, really fat, like, two hundred pounds, I think you would have the right to tell me you weren’t comfortable with that.” Even as I said this, I was not sure it was so true.
“Maybe I would have that right,” he said. “But I wouldn’t exercise it. Besides, I like a little real estate on a woman.”
I asked my friend C. about it. Her husband, V., was a carpenter, trim, muscular, dark. Then he took time off to be home with his kids and before long his stomach was lapping over his belt, and a few months after that, plain and simple, he was obese. “Are you still attracted to him?” I asked.
“No, not really,” she said.
“Does that bother you?” I asked.
C. paused. We were sitting in her kitchen, sipping coffee. “You know,” she said, “we have two kids. I work full time. I’m tired at the end of the day. He’s tired too, more so because now he’s out of shape. We’ve stopped having sex. I get a lot more sleep. And if I had to choose between sex and sleep, I’d pick sleep.”
I asked my friend D. She had once had a boyfriend who got nose cancer, and they had to take off his nose. He was lucky, in that that stopped the cancer, but now he was maimed and had to wear a prosthetic nose held on by a band.
“What did you do?” I said.
“We broke up,” she said.
“Because he had no nose?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” she said. “The cancer illuminated a lot of things for us, ways in which we were not compatible.”
“So it had nothing to do with the nose,” I said.
“That’s what I like to tell myself,” she said, and then she touched her own nose, as though it might be growing.
I’m quite sure that I could not love a beautiful dummy, a stocky blond jock who watched football while tossing peanuts in his mouth. However, during the beardless crisis, I learned that I could not feel eros towards a man I found odd looking. And the old saying “To know him is to love him” just holds no water for me. Obviously, I knew my husband when he shaved off his beard or let it grow too long, and, sad to say, whatever inner beauty he had was temporarily blocked by his surface sheen, at least when it came to sex. Lunch, dinner, chess, hanging out, talking, none of that was affected, but sex is about bodies, it is about skin, surface touching surface; sex is superficial, and, as it turns out, the superficial is pretty profound.
After my husband went baby-faced, I started doing some research into evolutionary psychology, specifically as it relates to sex. I spoke with anthropologists Helen Fisher and Elaine Hatfield, each of whom told me that beauty—our perception of it, that is—plays a crucial role in the survival of our species. According to these experts, we love/are attracted to beautiful people, those with symmetrical faces, proportioned bodies, and so on because these people are frequently the healthiest, and although we do not know it, we select our mates based on their ability to perpetuate our little packet of genes.
This explanation comforted me. It did not bring the beard back to my husband’s face, but it did let me off the hook, at least a little bit. All right, so I was not a corrupt product of advertising culture, at least not totally. I was responding to an ancient limbic drive, protecting the babies that would one day be mine, yearning for symmetry, a chin, sanguinity to pass on down the line. “Beards,” Helen Fisher told me, “signify a man with a lot of testosterone, and that’s why women find them attractive.”
One would think, then, that the bigger the beard, the hotter the guy. But somehow it doesn’t work that way.
“Did you know, honey,” I said to my husband over dinner that night, “a beard signifies a good supply of testosterone?”
“Really?” he said. He smiled at me. “So if you shave your beard does your testosterone level drop?”
“I don’t know why you wouldn’t grow the beard back for me,” I said.
“Maybe if you stopped asking I would,” he snapped.
So I stopped. Weeks passed. I ceased being shocked, but in shock’s place was a sort of dullness, a certain reserve.
Then a friend of Benjamin’s from college came to visit. “Hey, Benjamin,” he shouted as he came in. “You finally shaved off that beard. God, you look so much better without it.”
“You think so?” I said.
“If there is one thing I’ve learned over years of shaving and growing facial hair,” said Benjamin, “it’s that people always, always prefer you how they met you originally. No one who met me without a beard has ever really liked my beard, and no one who met me with a beard has ever really thought I look good without one.”
“I met you with a beard,” I said.
“That’s obvious,” he said.
What exactly is the beauty we pursue to protect our progeny? Some studies have shown that people find symmetrical faces the most beautiful, but I wonder if beauty is best defined by familiarity. It’s not that there is some objective standard out there; we love what we know, and what we call lovely is really solace, home. In the 1950s, one of psychology’s greatest scientists, Harry Harlow, did a series of fascinating experiments with baby monkeys. These experiments were, in their own way, horrible, but like a horror movie, they revealed something essential about what it means to love and to be loved. Harlow removed baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers and raised them in isolated cages with mannequin mothers who were wired up to deliver milk. Some of these mannequin monkey mothers were not quite finished by the time the batch of babies were born, so some babies had mannequin mothers with just a plain wooden ball for a head—no face, no monkey mouth, no simian eyes, no features, nothing. And because this was the only mother these monkeys had, they each came to love their faceless mannequin, and to cling to her, and to drink from her wired milk supply. A few weeks later, Harlow and colleagues painted faces on their incomplete monkey mannequins. They painted beautiful simian faces with eyes of gentleness and color. But when the baby monkeys saw these faces, they screamed, and with their little hands, reached out and turned the wooden ball of the head so the face faced backwards, and they were again in the embrace of the flat, featureless nothingness that for them was home, was whom they loved.
The first face may always be the most beautiful face. When we find a partner attractive to us perhaps we are not really thinking take me with you so much as bring me back. Six years later my husband was bearded again, and I noticed his strawberry-blond beard was going gray, flecked here and there, and his eyes seemed tired. One night, he pointed out to me his bald spot, a circle widening slowly on the crown of his head, the exposed scalp pink as a salmon, too vulnerable looking to touch. “Will you love me when I’m old and bald?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I somehow knew I would. Which, of course, contradicts everything I have just said. I know how an evolutionary psychologist would explain this contradiction: no longer in reproductive mode, I will no longer need his beauty. And he will no longer need any of mine. In other words, I will love him without eros. Of course this explanation falls prey to the assumption that the elderly do not need beauty because they do not have sex. I can’t comment on this right now, although I’m sure I will when my time comes, if I should be so lucky. When I am old and toothless, when he is gray and wrinkled . . . I think, if I get there, I will just be happy to have him near me—I will think, This is Benjamin—someone to sleep with in the truest, most literal sense, side by side as our days begin to darken.