The one where my wife asks "when a man grows a beard like that, does he think it looks good?"

10 Likes

Iā€™m pretty sure he doesnā€™t care if it looks good or not.

21 Likes

all i know is i wont be getting smooches from the wife with a beardā€¦ so there is that.

8 Likes

My face is the only place where I can still grow hair and itā€™s socially acceptable to do so, so why the hell not?

12 Likes

I told her that there was a faction on reddit that considered beards like that to be magnificent. I also said that maybe it was a generational thing, and that maybe she might be too old to appreciate it.

Iā€™ll be sleeping in the guest room tonight.

21 Likes

If a man grows a beard like that, he gets 10 minutes extra in bed every morning. I think it looks OK, but I think it would look better in a brighter colour. Maybe purple. With some black raccoon stripes.

16 Likes

ā€œDonā€™t ever grow a beard like that, I donā€™t think it looks good.ā€ ?

5 Likes

I had to shave my full beard down to a short goatee and cut my hair short yesterday. Apparently people would want to put me in a padded room if I kept it up. I disagree, itā€™s like growing your own scarf, and I was starting to channel a 1966 Bob Dylan on top. Some people just canā€™t appreciate art.

9 Likes

12 Likes

ā€œHoney, thatā€™s one of those questions where there is no right answer. You just have to say something like, ā€˜You always look handsome to me,ā€™ or some other such non-answer.ā€

6 Likes

I think maybe paired with a hat of some sort, he achieves some anonymity when out in public.

My brother used to live in Athens for his postgrad education, and he mentioned to me that the general rule among the populace there was ā€œdonā€™t mess with Michael Stipe, and allow him his privacyā€.
My assumption is that over the years, that civility has possibly eroded, hence the beard.

9 Likes

Iā€™m probably among the more blatantly unqualified commentators on male facial aesthetics; but one theory Iā€™ve heard repeatedly is that growing a beard is sort of like taking out an option(in the finance sense) with respect to aging.

Beards tend to make you look a bit older(considered a feature by those tragically cultivating some chin-pubes; philosophers; wizards; and VMS or UNIX sysadmins; otherwise generally considered a defect); but for this reason, growing a beard gives you the option of removing it for a hit of relative facial youth at some point in the future.

Since how old you are tends to get increasingly burdensome over time; some people choose accellerated apparent aging in the short term in order to be able to revert at a later time, when time weighs heavier. Entropy laughs a hollow, pitiless, laugh; but that goes for basically anything complex systems do.

13 Likes

Show me a man who doesnā€™t let his beard grow once in a while, even if itā€™s only for a day or so, and youā€™ve shown me a man who thinks more ofsocial pressure than he does of his own comfort. And show me a man who says he likes to shave, and youā€™ve shown me a man who is either a liar or is asking for punishment.

-From the short story ā€œSee?ā€ By Edward G. Robles Jr.

14 Likes

In the same way that ā€œeveningā€ lasts until Iā€™m ready to go to bed; and ā€œMorningā€ is over when my breakfast and coffee say it is; anything I do not intend to let grow into a beard is, categorically, ā€˜stubbleā€™, regardless of petty empirical matters like length.

This truth allows you to skip tedious shaving without ever letting your beard grow, unless desired.

8 Likes

When I was in my first job after college, I had as many years postgraduate education as I had undergrad education. However, I was 23 years old but could probably pass for 15 or 16 in all seriousness. Now that I didnā€™t need to look super clean cut for going on job interviews, I found that growing a beard was a huge advantage in helping me look older. Iā€™ve had it ever since.

And male pattern baldness is what exactly? Now that I canā€™t grow hair on my head, I have to grow it on my face to avoid looking like a skinhead.

3 Likes

Donā€™t feel bad. I couldnā€™t grow a halfway decent beard until my late twenties, and a very few years later it started falling out in patches (as it does in the process of going grey for some men, the dermatologist says). It only started to look decent again in my late forties because Iā€™d finally achieved some equilibrium with the amount of grey on each side of my face.

5 Likes

Alternate interpretation: the beard is flagging ā€œI already have a mate, I donā€™t have to care about attractiveness anymoreā€.

Problematic from a dozen angles, but not implausible.

5 Likes

I donā€™t understand antipathy toward beards like we had in the 1950s in the US, but I donā€™t understand the great lumbersexual love of beards we have today either. Itā€™s more accurately a flag for ā€œIā€™m a real man who eats bacon and drinks whiskey and goes to the gym every day, and Iā€™m totally secure in my sexuality and not gay at all, no seriously dude, Iā€™m not gay, just look at the beardā€¦ā€

2 Likes

If I shave my beard, I risk getting a divorce. I keep threatening to shave it, the moment I sense some weakness, it is gonna go.

5 Likes
1 Like