1988, life was great, summer of my senior year.  I was 18, tall and lean, and introduced to fake hair.  Her name was strong, her hair was long, she was dating a good friend of mine. I planned a trip, rented a whip(Car), I thought we’d have a great time. That’s not how it went.

Lashif and I decided to take our respective girlfriends to Great Adventure in Jackson New Jersey. I was dating a girl named Rhonda and his girlfriend was named Alexis. This was the biggest thing that I had ever planned involving others. So I was excited to be the host of a great day trip. We all enjoyed amusement parks, so this was a win,win,win,win situation, if such thing a exist.

The park was about an hour and a half ride from where we lived in Jersey. We wanted to spend the whole day at the park, so we left around 8 am that morning. By 10:30 we were in the park. I suggested that we start with the rides with the longest lines, this normally ment that these were the funnest rides. So we headed to the biggest and best roller coaster at that time.  We get to the entry point to the line , which was already about a 45 min wait, and Alexis and Rhonda both announce that they didn’t want to mess up their hair. When they first said it, I was quite sure what they meant. I thought they were talking about wearing a hat, a scarf or something. I didn’t want to even imagine that they  weren’t going to ride anything, and that’s  exactly what happen. That’s exactly what happen. They both refused to ride anything that moved fast or involved water. This pretty much covered all the fun rides.

Lashif and I were very upset about this, because we wanted to have a couples outing. It turned out that it was more like a guys night out , with female chaperones. Lashif and I rode all the good rides by ourselves and the girls just wanted for us. We also ende up cutting the day short because they weren’t enjoying themselves that much, but their hair looked good. Having good hair was more important to them than having a good time.

This was  the first time that I had ever experienced a woman not wanting to do something because she didn’t want to mes up her hair. I was really bothered by this. I didn’t know that a hair-do was so important. This was my first real encounter with fake hair and it was bad. It was after that I started to look for fake hair in black woman, because I was now assuming that all woman with fake hair weren’t fun. They are more concerned about how they look than about enjoying life.  Maybe this wasn’t true, but it was true for me at that time.

Fast forward, two years later I went to the Six Flag amusement park in Atlanta, this time with a white woman. There wasn’t a conversation about the up keep of her hair. She put it in a pony tail and we were off and running. We rode damn near every ride in the park. we even rode a few  of the roller coasters twice. we had a great time.

It really bothered me that I wasn’t able to have as good of a time with a black woman as I was with a white woman, and to know that it was due to the preservation of a hair do, made with fake hair.  After that I had many more experiences with black woman and the “Don’t Touch  My Hair”  rule.  There was this one sister that I dated that would get all glam up to go anywhere. Then when she got to where she was going she would try to move as little as possible, because she didn’t want anything to fall out-of-place.  Sometime these things happened with woman who had real hair, either way here again a hair-do was limiting my fun.

Am I the only one out there that has had experiences like this? I want to hear from you. Have any of you had to limit you fun because you were with someone who had a high maintenance hair-do that they didn’t want to mess up? I’m also open to hearing from some women who love their hair that much, fake or not. Talk to me people.