My girlfriend chemically castrated me

I used to model. Nothing massive, I wasn’t on billboards or anything, but I did well enough through uni and a couple of years after. My hair was always the thing people mentioned. Thick, dark, the kind of hair that just sat right without me doing much to it. Agencies loved it. Girls loved it. I never thought about it because I never had to. I started seeing this girl about two years ago. She was the jealous type but I wrote it off as insecurity. She’d get weird if I followed a girl on Instagram. She’d want to know who was texting me. Normal-ish stuff. Her best friend was this girl called Mia. Mia was fit and she was friendly with me in a way my girlfriend clearly didn’t love. Nothing obvious. She’d just pay me a bit more attention than you’d expect. Compliment me sometimes. She mentioned my hair a couple of times, said it was one of the nicest she’d seen, which is a weird thing to say but I didn’t read into it. At a BBQ one summer she came up behind me and sort of ran her hand through my hair while we were all talking. It lasted about two seconds and I don’t think she even thought about it. But my girlfriend saw it from across the garden. She pulled me aside about ten minutes later and told me it made her really uncomfortable. I said she was overthinking it and we moved on. A few months after that BBQ I started noticing more hair in the shower. Not a lot at first. Just more than usual. I’d wash my hair and look at my hands and there’d be five or six strands which I told myself was normal. But over the next few weeks it got worse. Then it was ten or fifteen every wash. Then I’d run my fingers through it and they’d come out in clumps. I’d look at my hands and there’d be hair all over my fingers. I started checking it in different lighting. Comparing old photos. Pulling it back in the mirror. I couldn’t see a huge difference yet but something was definitely happening and it scared the shit out of me because my dad has a full head of hair at 60 and there’s no history of it in my family at all. I went to my GP and he barely looked at me before saying it was early stage male pattern baldness and writing me a prescription for finasteride. I started taking it every day. I read online that it takes a few months to work so I just waited. But the hair kept coming out. Same amount. Maybe more. I went back and the GP said give it more time, sometimes it takes six months to see results. So I kept taking it. About two months in I started noticing something else. I couldn’t get hard. At first I thought I was stressed or tired or in my own head. But it kept happening. Every time. I’d be there with my girlfriend wanting it to work and nothing would happen. Not reduced. Nothing. Like that part of my body had just been switched off. No morning wood. Nothing on my own either. I googled finasteride side effects one night at about 3am and found PFS. Post-finasteride syndrome. I spent the rest of the night reading forums full of guys describing exactly what I was experiencing. Some of them had stopped taking it months ago and nothing had come back. Some said years. I was 26 years old reading threads from men who were saying they might never have a normal sex life again. But I was still losing hair. So I kept taking it. Our sex life completely died. She’d try to initiate and I’d make an excuse. Every time. She went from being understanding to frustrated to suspicious. Then she started accusing me of cheating. Specifically with Mia. She was convinced the reason I couldn’t get hard with her was because I was sleeping with her best friend. We’d have these awful fights where she’d be crying asking me if I was fucking Mia and I’d be standing there knowing the real reason but unable to say it because that meant admitting the hair loss and the medication and all of it. So I just took the accusation. I let her believe whatever she wanted to believe because the truth felt worse. By this point I was nearly bald. The finasteride wasn’t doing anything because I know now it was never genetic in the first place. My girlfriend fell out with Mia over the whole thing. Accused her of sleeping with me. Mia denied it because obviously nothing had ever happened but my girlfriend wouldn’t hear it. The friendship was done. One night I’m in the other room with my headset on. I was supposed to be gaming but I’d taken the headset off and was just sitting there. She was in the bedroom on the phone to some guy mate of hers. She’s venting about me. About how we never have sex anymore. Saying she doesn’t understand what happened. He asks if I was on any medication and she says yeah for hair loss. He goes quiet for a second and says something like “that’s known for causing ED, that’s probably why.” And then silence. I’m pressed up against the wall and I can hear her breathing but she’s not saying anything. Ten seconds of nothing. I could feel her putting it together. The hair loss. The medication. The impotence. All of it. She changed the subject and they talked about something else. She never said a word to me about it. Not that night. Not ever. The relationship ended about a month later. After she moved out I was clearing out the flat. Top shelf of the bathroom cupboard, pushed right to the back behind a load of stuff, there’s a bottle of Nair. She doesn’t use Nair. I stood there holding it and something just clicked. I called her. I didn’t even plan what to say. I just said “why is there Nair in my bathroom cupboard.” She went quiet. I could hear her breathing. Then she started crying and it all came out. She’d been putting Nair in my shampoo. A tiny amount. Not enough to dissolve my hair in the shower but enough to weaken it over weeks and months. Enough that it looked natural. Enough that a GP would glance at it and write a prescription for medication I never needed. I stopped taking finasteride that day. That was about a year ago. My hair has actually started growing back. The ED has mostly resolved but not completely. Some mornings I’m fine. Some mornings I’m not. The doctors say PFS can take a long time to fully clear and in some cases it doesn’t. I’m 27 and I still don’t know if my body is ever going to be fully normal again. Because my girlfriend was jealous of her best friend touching my hair at a BBQ. After the breakup I ran into Mia at a friend’s birthday. She’d heard bits and pieces about what happened. We talked for a long time. Then we talked again. And again, for months. And guess what… I’m marrying her this weekend. [ ](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/thickr-snap-hair-scan-loss/id6757626046)