WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick.
The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.
I'm Steve Alman.
I'm Cheryl Stray.
This is Dear Sugar's.
Oh dear song, won't you please?
Yeah, some better sweet days with me.
I check my bedbub every day.
Oh, and this sugar, you see in my way.
Hi Cheryl.
Hi Steve.
Today we are going to talk about body weight and romance.
We were getting tons of letters from letter writers who were like most of us in a state of
confusion, shame, anguish, conflict about their own bodies and how profoundly that impacts
our effort to love and be loved with partners who also have their own set of complex
fraught feelings about their bodies.
Yeah, and we're going to talk today about what do you do when your partner has a body
that causes you some trouble.
You either feel concerned from a health standpoint or turned off from sexual desire or physical
attraction standpoint when you feel bewildered about what to do, how to address this.
It's such a complicated thing.
Okay.
Let me get started with the first letter.
Dear sugars, my partner's weight has fluctuated throughout her life.
She's a confident and strong woman who doesn't let appearance define who she is or what she
does.
Nonetheless, I know it's a sensitive subject to her.
Since we met, she has gained considerable weight.
I know she isn't happy about it, but she hasn't been able to change it for the past two
years.
She eats well, she exercises when she can, both independently and with me, exercises
a fun part of our relationship, but it doesn't change her weight.
Our genes and metabolism are simply not as forgiving as mine.
Still, two years is a long time, and now I'm asking myself whether obesity is something
I should accept for the long haul or start talking about.
I still love her, and this is not a question of ending our relationship, but we've never
talked about how her weight affects me.
I'm squished sitting next to her on public transportation and plane rides.
So much so that sometimes I've had to move one seat over.
We don't go hiking or camping or kayaking as often as we used to, because she's more
uncomfortable and more limited than before, and sex is more constrained.
On the one hand, I can work around these inconveniences.
I know our relationship and how we spend time together will change over time.
On the other hand, I'd like to advocate for myself and the things I want to share with
her, including a long and healthy life together.
It's her body, and she doesn't need me to pressure her about it, especially because
she's already doing the best she can.
She's been clear in the past that this is something she would like to manage herself.
But I still want to talk to her about it.
Is that wrong?
Do you have any advice for how I can talk about how I feel?
Or should I keep my feelings to myself?
I should mention that her body isn't the only one that's changed since our relationship
began.
Since we've met, I've had an elective double mastectomy with masculine reconstruction.
My body is still full of estrogen, and I still identify as a woman and a lesbian.
But I also identify as genderqueer, non-binary, comfortable with masculinity while not being
male, and transgressing the confining social construct of woman.
My partner has supported me and cared for me during this change, even though she misses
my breasts and doesn't like the scars.
Our relationship is unchanged and still full of love and care.
For me, the change is in my body since we met where a dream come true.
For her, they were the return of something she wishes she didn't have to deal with.
Maybe that makes it harder for us to talk about it.
I wish we could talk about these body changes without it feeling so heavy.
I wish I could be as supportive and caring and helpful to her as she is to me.
Thanks for your advice.
Signed, benched.
You know, benched, I think you are trying so hard to be a good compassionate partner,
and I think your partner is too.
It's clear to me from reading this letter that both of you guys love one another.
You want to remain together.
This isn't, do I stay or go?
This is how do I manage some discontent and misgiving that I feel, knowing that it could
be hurtful, because here's your partner who is so supportive of the way that you chose
to change your body, even though she loved your breasts.
Probably didn't want you to have this elective surgery.
You're then saying to yourself, well, can I really express this discontent?
She was so patient and loving and supportive to me.
Do I have the right to even articulate knowing that she wants to manage this herself?
Do I have the right to, in any way, comment upon the fact that she's gained enough weight
that it's a health concern.
It's not just inconveniencing the relationship.
It's shortening potentially the amount of time that you have to spend together.
And when you're realistic about what a long-term monogamous relationship is going to be,
then you look ahead and say, what's it like in 20 or 30 or 40 years?
It's not just we don't kayak as often.
It's my gracious.
She could become diabetic or high blood pressure or whatever else.
I think it's really, really hard and complicated.
And I think that Bench is aware of some of those things.
I mean, when she says that she knows that it's her partner's body and she doesn't need
anyone to pressure her about it, especially because she's already doing things to try
to manage her way that are not succeeding.
And what I think you have going for you is some sensitivity and awareness of that.
My advice would be to really try to deepen your intimacy with your partner when it comes
to maybe broader issues of which this struggle with obesity may be a part.
Tune into each other and maybe approach this conversation like, how are you doing?
How are things?
I know maybe once or twice a year my husband and I will have a kind of state of the self
conversations where I'll say to my husband, I'm feeling badly.
I'm feeling like I put on weight and I'm not exercising enough.
Day after day goes by and I say I want to start doing yoga again and I don't do yoga.
Somehow when it comes from me, when I'm saying to him, this is what I'm struggling with.
And then he can be that supportive person who's saying, I'm on your side, I want to support
you in losing weight.
I'm not feeling like he's saying, I wish he dropped 30 pounds.
And there's just a very different dynamic at play.
So to be really practical benched, I wouldn't go straight in with the weight.
I would say to your partner, hey, I want to connect.
Let's do something together that allows us to both talk to each other about where we're
at in our lives.
And there's something about benched, I'm sure you have some stories of your own.
Is everything going great for you?
Are you happy with every part of your life?
Share with your partner your struggles.
They don't have to be about weight about whatever you're struggling with.
I seem to be always struggling with one thing or another.
And I find that that's a great opener.
And when she does step in, if she does step in to say, I'm concerned about my weight gain.
I'm not feeling good.
I do think it's okay for you to say, I've worried too.
I miss hiking and kayaking with you as often as possible.
I have worried about your health.
I want you to be alive for a long time.
I think that those kinds of conversations where the person who's weight is in question
is leading the way are going to be a lot more successful than any kind of, I need to
tell you that I think you're too fat.
I think what happens sometimes, and it sounds like this might be happening here benched,
for her this weight gain, as you say, is a return to a state that's familiar to her.
And as Cheryl was alluding to, there's a lot of shame.
We know that shame's central effect is to inhibit and to silence.
And so, even though both of you are aware that you're having to nudge further and further
over on the seat, and she's taking up more space in the world, and you're kayaking less
in the sex is more constrained, even though it's obvious in those moments, nobody says
anything about it.
And the question is, how do we gracefully and sensitively speak about this huge subject
that is right in front of us?
People do, at the same time, they're ashamed, they want to unburden themselves and not
be in this sort of enforced omerta about it.
They want to actually be able to get it out into the open and talk about it so that it
isn't festering and suppressed and building up that dark energy within us.
But you're sensitive enough, Bench, to know that this is super, super fraught.
And so we can only kind of provide that sense of yes, you should find a way to talk about
it, but that also it cannot be punitive, judging, managing.
It has to be loving, supporting, and wanting to sort of bring to light the hopes that you
have for both of you to be as happy with your own body and with the other person's body
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Do it anyway.
So let's bring into the conversation the wonderful writer Ashley C. Ford.
She lives in Brooklyn by way of Indiana.
And she's mostly a writer, editor and public speaker.
She's currently writing a memoir and working as a senior features writer at Refinery29.
And one of the things that brought her writing to our attention and made us so excited about
having her on the show was the essay, Seeing My Body with Fresh Eyes.
So let's give Ashley a call.
All right.
Hello.
Ashley.
Hi.
Hi, this is Cheryl Stray.
How are you?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm great.
I'm here with Steve Almond.
We are in the studio and really excited to chat with you about Bodyweight and Romance
today.
Yes.
I make to chat with you guys about it too.
It's important.
I think people talk about it and that.
I wondered if we could first start with you telling us a little bit about some of your
experiences with your body and other people's bodies and love.
Can you share a bit of your story with us?
Absolutely.
Up until college and well into college, I was relatively thin.
I went to a high school that was about 95% black.
And to them, I was skinny.
Not like a tractor skinny but like very skinny.
And my boyfriend, at the time, the boyfriend I had from the time I was 14 until I was 20
years old, was always overweight.
And that was fine with me.
I never really had an issue with it.
I didn't think there was a big deal to be made about our bodies until I started gaining
weight and I was immediately self-conscious.
And I was so self-conscious about it because I came from a family where I was very close
to my grandmother who was kind of in a lot of ways along my life when she was alive.
But my grandma had some very messed up views about weight.
And she would say things like, I actually, I remember, I would take you to the store and
we'd take all these pants and the only ones that would fit you were side zero.
And I would be like, well, yeah, grandma, I remember also being a child, but I don't
have a child's body anymore.
But she was very concerned about my weight.
And it preoccupied her much more than it preoccupied me.
But I began to become more preoccupied with it through her influence and also through
the general influence of society.
And then, while in college, me and my high school boyfriend broke up, I was still getting
bigger.
I was also having certain health issues.
I ended up seeing doctors because I had all the symptoms of something I read about online
called polyphistic ovaries and so on.
And it was terrifying and my body just continued to expand and expand and expand and there was
really nothing I could do about it until I got up to about where I am now, which is about
215 pounds.
Though I've been heavier at times than I am now.
And I would say that I didn't really start getting comfortable with my body until I got
that PCOS diagnosis.
Like, that was the beginning of understanding what was going on with my body.
And then, as I sort of came to terms with the fact that unless I wanted to be a person
who lived at the gym and only ate vegetables, my body was never going to be a good person.
To be a societal stand.
Like it just never was going to be that.
And as you know, I don't need to tell you as a woman, you know, when your body isn't going
to meet those societal standards, a lot of times women are told and men too, I think
both, but especially women, you are not worthy of love and especially you're not worthy
of romance and sexual love.
And you know, you are not, you are not, and by any stretch, considered the sort of desirable
woman slot that we give to a very narrow band of women.
How did that impact your idea about yourself as a sexual and erotic being?
I spent a lot of time thinking that there were so many things I was going to have to change
about who I was if I was going to have this body.
I was going to have to be an easy, easy woman and not like easy in terms of promiscuity,
but easy in terms of.
If I'm going to be big, I can't also be difficult in relationship.
Like I thought, you know, a guy might stick around because I'm funny and because I'm smart
and you know, because I'm, you know, a good time to hang around, but I'm going to have
to be all those things all the time because he's never going to stick around because he
likes what he sees.
And how's that been your experience?
You know, not really.
To be perfectly honest, you know, I had, I mean, I had one terrible boyfriend who you think
he was very much in shape, you know, like Roman God-esque, like maybe an extra in the movie
300 or something like that, but he wasn't.
And he had a lot of things to say about my body and what I needed to do to change it.
And about how once I lost weight, we would have better sex.
And when I lost weight, how he would feel better about being with me, you know, and things
like that, like I've been in that situation.
And it only took once for me to understand that I'd rather be alone than have to deal
with someone who made me apologize from my body constantly.
And the relationship that I'm in now, it has been the complete opposite.
I went into it very much thinking, you know, how long until he has a problem with my body.
Wow.
I'm not necessarily right now, but there's going to come a moment.
There's going to be something that happens.
There's going to be a picture of us together that he sees and suddenly it's going to dawn
on him what he's gotten himself into.
And I very much believe that.
But I also knew that, you know, I would be happy to leave if he got mean.
So that was what I went into in relationship thinking.
You were like braced for him to, you know, critique you.
I was absolutely braced for him to critique me.
I was absolutely braced for the fact that when he found out that, you know, idealist,
anxiety, and depression, you know, which are symptoms of my PCOS, when he found out that,
you know, having children biologically might not be something I can do because of my PCOS.
It just seemed like even though these are things women deal with every day, it was going
to be exacerbated by the fact that I didn't have those issues, but was also thin or, you
know, like traditionally pretty, you know.
So I just kept thinking that there would come a time where, you know, I would be too much,
physically, too much.
And that time just never came.
Part of what this guy picked up on you is that you actually feel quite good about yourself.
You know who you are, are creatively powerful and alive, and that that in of itself is part
of how we contend with.
We, I think, are culturally conditioned women in particular to say, okay, as my body goes,
so goes my self-esteem.
But I think people who are really clued into what they really need and want in a loving
relationship are not looking at body sizes like your grandmother.
They're looking at, how does this person feel about themselves?
And what is their level of confidence in themselves?
What sounds like he picked up on the fact that you're kind of a badass and you're doing
what you want and writing beautiful, important stuff and putting it into the world.
And that really blows a lot of the superficial stuff off.
I mean, I think he would say that to you.
Like, if he was on this call right now, he would tell you that that is why he fell in love
with me.
You know, we met in college and he would tell you that I walked into the classroom and
he was immediately all about me.
And he wanted to impress me and making me laugh with his favorite thing in the world.
And at the time, I remember, you know, thinking, man, you know, I've got to lose weight.
Like I remember thinking that at the time.
Like, part of the reason why I never, you know, when we initially met, why I didn't think
he'd be into me was because, you know, he's pretty thin.
Like he's tall and he's thin and he's kind of fit.
And he's a very physical man, you know?
Like he hunts and, you know, our first date was going for willing.
And, you know, he's hikes the Appalachian Trail.
And he's a very, very physical man.
And I just thought, you know, no man that fit would quote unquote, settle for a woman who
looks like me.
No matter how strong I actually am, no matter how fit I actually am, what he's going to
see is the fact that, you know, I have a belly.
And I have these big thighs.
And I have a big butt, you know?
Like that's what I was thinking at the time.
And now, you know, I'm with this person.
And you know, one of the things that I wrote about in that piece that was really important
to me, you know, he's never said, you know, I love you in spite of your body.
Or it's not about that.
Or I look past that.
He is very adamant about the fact that I want you.
Like when I see you, I want you.
I am attracted to you as is.
And that was important.
Yeah.
And I want to say, first of all, that piece is called, it's an essay called, see myself
a fresh eye.
It was published on a blog called a Cup of Jail that's run by a woman named Joanna
Goddard.
She's doing a whole series on dating.
So I was the first essay in that series.
And it was really, really, really about dating and, and wait.
And one of the things also, I just want to point out before we get to this next letter,
that in that piece you wrote about, that it wasn't that he loved you at the weight you're
at now.
He's loved you at different weights.
He has.
He's seen me in about a 40 pound flux.
And maybe more to be perfectly on it, because there were times when I was scared to get on
the scale.
And there has never been a wavering.
But I feel like society really told me that men like that don't exist, that they simply
don't exist, and that any man who could be comfortable with me at a certain weight,
it was because he had a fetish for that work.
Right.
In fact, the previous boyfriend who was so, you know, derogatory was clearly struggling
with his own doubt.
And this is what people do.
They weaponize that self-doubt.
And men, I'm convinced, have so many hang-ups themselves, which they can't articulate.
And they put that on women.
So it sounds like the fellow you're with now, now engaged to, is really a confident guy
who has confidence in his body and is able to see you as a person rather than a weight.
And it's interesting, because I'm going to read this letter, Ashley, and it's really,
in a sense, the opposite dilemma that the letter writer is in, which has to do with her feelings
in all of these letters actually fluctuating with her partner's weight.
So let me go ahead and read that.
Here's your sugars.
I've been with my boyfriend for a little over two years.
I'm 31, and he's 34.
Neither of us has been married before, though I've been in a couple of long-term relationships
before.
This one is different.
It feels like a true meeting of equally loving equals.
We help each other to be whole.
We're stronger together.
Also, I love him to death, and he feels the same way.
I knew after about a week with him that I wanted to marry him.
We talked about it right from the start, and now we have tentative plans to get engaged
soon.
Here's the thing.
You knew there had to be a thing.
A few months ago, I went through a period of questioning the relationship.
He had put on some weight, and his face looked different, and I wasn't feeling as attracted
to him.
I know how shallow that sounds, but I've always been told that physical attraction is important
in a marriage, and I thought to myself, if I'm not feeling attracted to him when he's
34, how am I going to feel when he's 54?
I did some soul-searching and realized how important the relationship was to me.
It was strange when I made that decision in my heart, my libido followed, because I found
myself attracted to him again.
It felt so right that I felt even more connected to him than I had before.
That was a few months ago, and now I find myself questioning our relationship again.
His physical changes have gotten more pronounced, and I can't help but think of my sister and
my best friend, whose husbands both gained at least 50 pounds after they got married.
Neither my sister or my friend has any plans to leave their marriages, and they're both
still happy and in love, but my sister confessed to me that if she had met her husband at his
current weight, she might not have fallen in love with him.
They both say they're still attracted to their husbands, but not as much as they used
to be.
I'm so glad that my sister and my friend love their partners for who they are, not what
they look like.
That's the kind of person I want to be, too.
But I'm not married yet.
At this point, I'm still supposed to be deciding if I want to make a life commitment, right?
It seems like a questionable choice to commit to someone if I'm not sure of my attraction
to him.
And seeing how things played out between my sister and friend and their husbands, I don't
have any illusions that I can say to my boyfriend, honey, let's get some exercise and he'll get
in shape.
If he wants to get in shape, it has to be his choice, not mine.
I've been told by a few friends that I have a tendency to sabotage myself.
I didn't really know what that meant and still don't, but I think it means the deep down,
I don't feel like I deserve happiness and subconsciously make choices to ensure I don't
get it.
I've struggled with depression my whole life, so if my brain was playing tricks on me,
it wouldn't be out of the blue.
Could this be self-sabotage?
Because being madly in love with someone for more than two years and then backing away
because he's put on a few pounds, sure sounds like I'm either a terrible person or I have
some issues.
I've lost perspective, please tell me what you think, signed, scared to choose wrong.
I do think it's really interesting that you end with this bit about having a tendency
to sabotage yourself.
Because one of the things that's absolutely true about any long-term relationship you
went or into is the person that's going to change in appearance over time.
They just are, whether that's weight or wrinkles or gray hair or hair loss or sometimes disability,
sometimes real significant body changes.
Insurmiting, yep.
All kinds of stuff.
I do think that you're going down a very dangerous path when you so hitch your wagon to this
sort of idea of the erotic ideal and that partner is supposed to maintain that as closest
possible over time or else you're in trouble in the relationship.
I think that's really problematic.
I would caution you against acting on a few pounds in each direction.
I also want to point out this bit in the letter that I think is really interesting.
How much this is about your mind rather than what you see.
When you say, oh, the minute that you cast aside your doubts and realized, okay, he's
gained a little weight, big deal, you felt your physical attraction come back, your desire
came back.
I would say that it only went away because it was a trick of the mind.
You were telling yourself, I can't be with a guy who's a little bit chubby when actually
you were having a pretty great connection with a guy who was a little chubby.
When you write, I knew after about a week that I wanted to marry him, that's pretty quick.
I love that intense bond, but you heard Ashley say that it took a long time for her and
her fiance to figure out that they were really simpatico and that he was looking at her and
valuing her for the right reasons.
And for her to overcome her internal self-doubt about what her worth to him means and what
it's predicated on.
That process of coming to know is not a direct line from I'm enthralled and then we're
at the altar and all the way up, there's a courtship without any ambivalence or doubt.
I believe that there's a common confusion, which is if I'm noticing his weight, it's
going to be a deal breaker.
Well, guess what?
You're going to notice his wrinkles and his bald hair and his back hair and all the rest
of it.
And the reality is you have to consult with yourself, do I love this guy through thickness and
thin through beautiful gym body versus, hey, it's hard having kids or being married and
I've put on a few pounds.
That's not the rubric to judge by.
And if you are judging for that reason, what is it an expression of?
Your own internal ambivalence about a long term commitment, your feelings about the ways
in which your body might change, there's something more.
When you're doubting somebody else, I believe almost always, it's an expression of self-doubt.
I agree.
And I would also ask, how does he feel about his weight?
Because I don't see anything in the letter that really talks about how he feels about
himself.
And I know that that can be a hard conversation to have with a partner who's put on
a certain weight.
But if you're talking about spending a lifetime with somebody, this is peanuts.
You need to be able to at least brooch the subject and have the conversation about how
he feels about his body.
I see a lot of, this is how his weight gain is making me feel and I've seen this happen
to other people and I'm scared.
And to be perfectly honest, reasonable feelings, but right now they all seem like you're trying
to make a lot of decisions about someone else by yourself.
And in a relationship, you need to be having that conversation with the other person.
You can't keep all this in your head, my relationship with my boyfriend.
Our first year of dating was long distance.
He lived in Seattle and I lived in Indiana and then in New York.
And we figured out very quickly that the only way, the relationship was going to be
able to survive.
As much as we loved each other was going to be talking about things up front because
there was no, you know, pouting around the person and waiting for them to ask you what
was wrong.
He would never know anything was wrong if I didn't say it and vice versa.
So I think you need to open the lines of communication here maybe a little bit more than what you're
comfortable with, you know, and say, hey, I've noticed, you know, maybe you've put on
a little weight.
How do you feel about that?
Like, are you feeling okay?
Because sometimes the person putting on weight is not just indicative of like, well, now
I'm in love and comfortable.
Sometimes putting on weight is indicative of something else.
You're absolutely right.
It's not helping the person for you to sit and stew and question it all by yourself
in your head because they're obviously part of it.
It's interesting because scared to choose wrong, you know, she's at this moment where
she's really questioning everything.
She's saying, listen, you know, if I feel this way, when he's 34, how am I going to feel
when he's 54?
You know, physical attraction is important in a long-term relationship.
Isn't this the time for me to be questioning that?
And it is, you know, I think that your questions are valid, but anyone who got married at
30 and then was still, you know, having sex with the person at 80 will tell you that
they wouldn't have picked that 80-year-old back with their 30.
Our bodies change over time, our personalities, you know, to some degree change over time,
our interests will change over time.
You know, part of being in a long-term relationship is being open to the idea of seeing your partner
a new.
And this is true in the physical realm as well.
And so I agree with Ashley's point here, be open, but also, you know, maybe challenge
yourself in opening this conversation between the two of you.
I wouldn't recommend that it's like a confrontation where you're saying, listen buddy, you're getting
a little chubby.
But rather, let us talk to each other about our own thoughts, about our own bodies.
Yeah, you know, a couple of quick things for you to think about, scared to choose wrong.
The one thing that you're wise to, and this is really crucial, one thing you know about
yourself, or at least you've been told and have good reason to believe, is that you tend
to sometimes sabotage yourself and that you seem aware as you write that maybe finding
fault around this particular issue is one way of undoing a relationship that intuitively
feels right to me and that I knew early on there was a spark.
That's the thing about love is that long-term love, it's not the spark, it's not the initial
spark, it's how long is the fire going to keep?
And so look at this as an opportunity to think deeply within yourself.
Is this a moment where I'm sabotaging myself?
The first time you did that, magically your ambivalence about him went away.
You thought deeply what would it be like to lose this person?
And suddenly that narrative that had been put in your head, I've always been told that
physical attraction matters a lot, evaporated.
That's probably no mistake.
You're a deeper person than you realize.
And what she found was she was physically attracted to someone she didn't imagine she
would be physically attracted to.
And I think that that's a really important distinction to make.
Scared to choose wrong as you really contemplate this choice.
I would agree.
And I would also say for the record, Steve was talking a little bit earlier about being
scared of certain things in yourself and then being afraid of them and other people.
And I get the feeling that this person might also be a little bit thinking, well I didn't
gain weight or what if I gained weight, how would my partner look at me?
And the reason why I wrote the FAI wrote and why I talk about my relationship with my
boyfriend with my fiance, I'm having a really hard time sticking to that word.
And the internet and things like that is because I want to make it clear the truth of the
matter is for people with bigger bodies, we are actually not hard to love.
That's right.
We are actually desirable.
We are as fabulous and as wonderful as we want to be.
He didn't give this to me.
He helped me get here, which is what a partner should do.
Ashley, thank you so much for offering us your story and some good advice for scared to
choose wrong.
We love talking to you.
Thank you so much for having me.
I love this podcast.
I listen to it every week.
Thank you.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye bye.
You too.
Bye.
Dear sugars is produced by the New York Times in partnership with WBUR.
Our producer is Michelle Siegel.
Our executive producer is Lisa Tobin and our editorial director is Samantha Henning.
We record the show at Talkback Sound and Visual in Portland, Oregon.
Our engineer is Josh Millman.
Our theme song is by Liz Weiss and other music is by the Portland band called Wonderly.
Find us at nytimes.com slash deer sugars.
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