I Love My Husband— I Didn’t Always Love His Headband

My husband wears a headband almost all of the time. He’ll wear one in the airport or to brunch in the West Village. He sometimes wears one to bed. It’s a simple sweatband, cotton and stretchy. Think Richie Tenenbaum, or Paulie Bleeker, but solid black. It’s always black. He buys them by the dozen and keeps them folded neatly in the top drawer of his dresser. A lawyer by day and the frontman in a rock band by night, he is the sartorial yin to my yang, the actually doesn’t care to my tries very hard not to care but definitely cares.

From the very beginning of our courtship, our style differences were stark. I was an editorial assistant at a men’s magazine. I dressed how I imagined Dorothy Parker might dress if she shopped at Housing Works and H&M, favoring full skirts and Ferragamo heels. He was a law student with a penchant for hoodies, headbands, and sneakers.

We started out as friends. It was the kind of beautiful, uncomplicated friendship between a man and a woman for whom it seems impossible to become anything more. One reason it seemed impossible was that I had almost married one of his best friends. Another was, of course, the headband. It was just the type of shallow deal-breaker one feels compelled to hold onto in their 20s. For a girl far too concerned about the appearance of things, the headband was a nonstarter.

So, for more than a year, our relationship was purely platonic. We met once or twice a week at different bars in the village. One night at the Corner Bistro, he casually mentioned that when he had children, he would read every textbook along with them so that he could talk to them about school. A few months later, he sent me a letter—a paper letter in the mail even though we lived on the same street. It was on proper stationary engraved with his initials. It said, “Liz, write your book. Seriously. Write it. I want to read it soon, Bert.” It began to occur to me that there might be more important factors in choosing a life partner than his accessory of choice.

Still, if anyone had told me that watching a man try on white jeans at a Kmart would be the thing to finally win me over, I would have been skeptical. But that was how it happened. It was the Fourth of July and Bert’s band had a gig at the Mercury Lounge. They had decided to dress in red, white, and blue. Bert needed to get his outfit and I tagged along. The attraction was palpable at this point: eyes catching across the table palpable; legs grazing in the taxi palpable. This tension was bubbling to the surface, strangely enough, as Bert pulled on a pair of white jeans at the Kmart on Astor Place. (To be clear, I am not a person who has typically found white jeans on men to be alluring.) I could feel my face flush as I said, “Yep, those are the ones.”

Later that night, I watched from a crowded dance floor, entranced, as he took the stage, singing songs he had written himself. The vibration of the music and the red glow of the spotlights washed over everything. I had to admit, the headband lent a certain je ne sais quoi. Coupled with his uncanny ability to command a room of strangers with his voice and a guitar, it suddenly seemed proof of how comfortable he was in his own skin, how certain of himself. After his set, we found each other in the sea of young bodies that glistened in the humid summer air. The distance we were trying so hard to maintain melted away with the music, the vodka tonics, his slanted smile. I felt the pull of his hands on my hot pink Ralph Lauren dress. And then I felt his lips on mine. That was the beginning of the end of my reservations about the headband.

A few years down the line, he wore one as he carried boxes up the stairs to the apartment we would share as husband and wife. It struck me as a highly practical choice. He, mercifully, did not wear one the week after that, when we said our vows on an unseasonably warm September day. He wore one throughout our honeymoon and I hardly even noticed. When our first daughter was born and the in-hospital photographer was making her rounds, the proud new dad promptly pulled out a freshly washed headband and slid it onto her delicious-smelling newborn head. (One size fits all, apparently.) He held her cheek to cheek, headband to headband, and smiled for the camera. I couldn’t help but grin, but I drew the line at donning one myself or using that photo for the announcement.

Still, I have come a long way. I have even considered the possibility that it’s subversive and fashion-forward in its own right. After all, haven’t some of the most stylish people in history honed a look based on a simple trademark? There’s Carolina Herrera and her crisp white shirts. There’s Karl Lagerfeld and his sunglasses. There’s my husband and his headband?

Now, I shudder to think what might have been lost to my superficial anti-headband leanings. And if I catch a stranger glancing at him wearing one with say, a suit jacket, I’ll shoot them a look that says, What of it? Recently, when a man my husband plays music with remarked, “I know how much you must love the headband,” I shook my head and smiled an accept-the-things-you-cannot-control smile, but in that moment, I realized how much I actually do love the headband. Because, well, I love the guy wearing the headband. And that’s what counts.

Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day until Valentine’s Day.