Maybe for some people it is true, I really cant tell if it is big portion or not. I dont know how you can make this judgement through online forum. I dont rush to make assumptions on people I dont know. But I really dont find it hard to believe that hairloss will have such great effect on success with women, because it is pretty simple:
- looks is large factor on the dating market
- confidence as well
- looks takes massive hit when you lose hair
- your confidence is automatically decreased since you look worse now (lets be real, confidence is usually, and suppose to be effected by external factors. Saying stuff like "you should be confident for whoever you are" is just empty statement, because this kind of confidence often points on lack of self awareness, and cannot be acquired)
- decreased looks and confidence => decreased success with women
Those are my thoughts in general, but if I talk about me for a minute - As I stated before here, hairloss bothers me just by itself, it barely about women. I have severe bdd and just cant look myself at the mirror as hairloss keep progressing (slow but steady)
But yes even I can honestly say that in the past I got looks and attention from women anywhere I go (since I tall and mascular with overall good look), but as the time passed, I see it happen less and less, and nothing about me is changing except for hair.
As regard the medication - ye of course anybody should think it through and be responsible for the risk he takes, but it is not the issue.
I mean I’m not going to deny that losing your hair makes you unattractive compared to when you had it, science has shown that to be the case. Even if it’s only in the unconscious level, people with hair loss are seen as less attractive than their counterparts.
It’s not just this forum, but all similar ones. Reddit, in particular is full of it. If you’re having issues attracting women and you assume it must be physical, then hair loss is a convenient straw man. Honestly read around just this section and you will see what I mean. It’s all fixated on how many chicks someone will get because they have slightly better hair, my my girl left me because my hair was falling out, how being bald makes you celibate.
I agree that the “just shave it”, be confident, work out, etc refrain around this board and others is unlikely to make you more confident or as successful with women as you would if you had hair. You can’t fake confidence and if you’re fundamentally unhappy with yourself none of that is going to make a difference. The whole idea behind the gym routine and all that is to try and boost your self-confidence, but it may not do a damn thing if the only thing you see when you look in the mirror is your hairline. The problem for many is that their hair is more important to them than other physical changes; it’s a scale that can’t ever be balanced, let alone offset.
Coping strategies and hairloss are apples and oranges situation and it’s ultimately going to come down to whether or not you can accept what you see enough to move past it. If you can’t then, yes, losing your hair is going to make things worse across the board.
Sometimes I wonder if places like this do more harm than good as they tend to encourage the notion that one day you will magically get your hair back through some fanciful treatment that’s only “a few years away” or some magical regimen that both doctors and centuries of men with this issue somehow missed. Best of intentions aside, it facilitates a collective state of indefinite denial that prevents many from ever moving forward or making their peace with who they are. Instead of being a person with male pattern baldness, they become a person defined by male pattern baldness clinging to an idea that someday somehow there will be a way to cure a genetic condition, while ignoring just how far fetched that notion is. If we could stop or reverse genes from expression we would be able to cure existing hereditary cancers and eliminate them in future generations overnight.
In the end, though it’s one of those things like your height or your age, which cannot be changed and is pointless to bemoan. If you let it control you or are willing to do anything to try and change it, you’re likely to find yourself in a hole so deep, that by the time you emerge huge swaths of your life may have passed you by and, (depending on what meds you take and how lucky you are), you may have made things far worse.
I imagine that, with BDD, these measures would have little, if any effect. I am sorry you have to deal with that condition. I don’t have it and so I suspect I’ll never know what that’s truly like, but just the concept of it is awful.