Hair loss the ultimate enemy of your perception of your own youth, vigour, and attractability. It really has nothing to do with a more "old" approach to life and relationships.
Your girlfriends who still love you despite your hair loss love you for other reasons. If all they cared about was their ability to attract good looking men, they wouldn't be in a long term relationship with a balding man. Women in general often view relationships as either moving toward increasing commitment and fulfillment or stagnant... in the latter case, you may be asked the dreaded question "Where is this going?"
Trax, you admit that it would be your own head that would end your relationship. That extensive hair loss would drive you so insane that you couldn't possibly sustain a relationship. I think this feeling, something I've confronted myself, comes from the mentality that you must be able to attract good looking women by your looks alone. Though you're in a good relationship, you're much like the husband with three kids who refuses to get a visectemy- there's just something inherently "old" about renouncing the ability to go out and attract a beautiful young girl that instinctively we are totally opposed to.
This brings me to my point.
Since time is the enemy with hair loss, if you find yourself feeling total dread with the encroaching inevitability, you should break up with your girl friend and go out and try to f*** as many good looking women as you can, irregardless of any other lacking qualities. I notice a common theme in the posts in this thread: that you believe that currently you are attractive (or at least, not ugly), but that soon you won't be able to get a date because of your hair loss. If you thought you were ugly to begin with, you wouldn't really be worried about it as much. So, while there is still time, you need to exorcise your need to be superficially attractive through sexual conquests. If you don't, then hair loss will continue to mess with your head to a debilitating degree.
The initial reaction is that you don't want to break up with your girlfriend, because not only is she a hottie, but you also enjoy her company, otherwise you wouldn't be with her for any length of time. This makes sense- in fact, if we were like most people with hair loss, who aren't affected mentally to the extent we are, staying with the girl would be clearly the thing to do.
But the concern here is even with the current relationship, which is great, it's with the ability to attract women afterwards should the relationship end for any reason. And since you're already thinking about that possibility, and the situation becoming ever more difficult as you lose more and more hair while still with your girlfriend, you need to go out and do it to death. You don't want a commited relationship right now- if you did, you wouldn't be worried about being able to attract women superficially, because that just leads to sex. While the girl you have may be wonderful, this type of relationship is just not beneficial to your psychological health right now.
I realize this reasoning seems immature and selfish (I'm sure that's how your girlfriend would describe it). Hair loss is an issue of aging- we consider it a sign of physical decay and unattractiveness, though it physically does not affect any of the components of our personality that actually sustain real relationships. We consider our hair loss to be pre-mature. It affects us negatively because we, as young men, have the need to attract women. We need to be a stud- instinctively, we are in the spawning period of our lives in which we are programmed to try to spread our genes as much as possible. There's nothing we can do about this. Though as young men we do enjoy relationships that go beyond sex, we still have the need to be attractive to attractive women. We still try to catch their eye, even if we are fulfilled.
To accept hair loss we have to get over this. Hair loss ignites a mid life crisis no matter how old you are- you wonder if you've really lived your life fully as a young man should. You're not ready to make the change to a middle aged man, by definition someone who can't get a hot girl unless he's rich.
I'm not trying to say that just because you get dealt the hair loss card you need to become a middle aged man. But you do need to accept that as you become noticibly bald, you will no longer be perceived as you were with a full head of hair. You will no longer be as superficially good looking, and it will be much harder to attract the girls you once did simply with your looks. What sort of women do you get with your looks alone? Superficial ones. Girls that are not relationship material. Sport-fucks. Not relationship material. The girls that match your personality, that you enjoy spending time with (and the feeling is mutual) you can still get with or without hair loss. They're the ones that matter.
So if encroaching hair loss is bothering you, you need to sow your wild oats, get some stds, get it out of your system. Then you can move onto the world of relationships without the baggage of hair loss dogging your identity. Don't stop taking propecia though!
