The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart-sick.
The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.
I'm Steve Allman.
I'm Cheryl Strayed.
This is Dear Sugars.
Oh, dear song, won't you please Share some little sweet days I check my mailbox every day.
Oh, and the sugar you send 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 a sexual desire or physical attraction standpoint, when you feel, you know, bewildered about what to do, how to address this.
It's such a complicated thing.
OK, 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.
Exercise is a fun part of our relationship, but it doesn't change her weight.
Her 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? 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 changes in my body since we met were 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, Bencht.
And I think your partner is too.
And 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 and probably didn't want you to have this elective surgery.
And so you're then saying to yourself well, can I really change, 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, you could become diabetic or high blood pressure or whatever else.
I think it's really, really hard and complicated.
And I think that Bencht 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 weight that are not succeeding.
Bencht, 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 bad lately.
I'm feeling like I put on weight and I'm not exercising enough.
Or day after day goes by and I say I want to start doing yoga again and I don't do yoga.
And 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, you know, I'm on your side.
I want to support you in losing weight.
I'm not feeling like he's like, gee, I wish she'd drop 30 pounds.
And there's just a very different dynamic at play.
So to be really practical, Benj, 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, Benj, 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 something.
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.
You know, I do think it's okay for you to say, you know, I've worried too.
I miss, you know, 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.
You know, I think that those kinds of conversations where the person whose weight is in question is leading the way are going to be a lot more successful than any kind of.
You know, 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 Bench is.
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, and 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 and 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 sort of 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 as you can be.
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 Strait.
How are you?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm great.
I'm here with Steve Allman.
We are in the studio and really excited to chat with you about body weight and romance today.
Yes.
I'm excited to chat with you guys about it, too.
It's important.
I don't think people talk about it enough.
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 in 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 students.
And to them, I was skinny, not like attractive 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, you know, 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, you know, was kind of, in a lot of ways, the love of my life when she was alive.
But my grandma had some very messed up views about weight.
And she would say things like you know Ashley, I remember I would take you to the store and we'd take all these pants in, and the only ones that would fit you were a size zero.
And I would be like well yeah grandma, you know, I remember also being a child like, but I don't have a child's body anymore.
But, you know, 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, you know, the general influence of society.
And then, you know, while in college, me and my high school boyfriend broke up.
I was still getting bigger.
I was also having, like, certain health issues.
I ended up seeing doctors because, you know, I had all the symptoms of something I read about online called polycystic ovary syndrome.
Right.
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.
That was the beginning.
Huh. 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 societal standard.
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're not 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 person, 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 has 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 for my body constantly.
And the relationship that I'm in now, it has been the complete opposite.
I went into it very much thinking that you know, how long until he has a problem with my body?
Wow.
Like he doesn't 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 believed 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 a 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, I deal with 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, that there would come a time where 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, know who you are, are creatively powerful and alive, and that that in and 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?
It 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 was 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 four wheeling and you know he's hiked the Appalachian trail and he's a very, very physical man.
And I just thought 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 I have a belly and I have these big thighs and I have a big butt.
That's what I was thinking at the time.
And now I'm with this person And one of the things that I wrote about in that piece that was really important to me he's never said 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?
Seeing Myself with Fresh Eyes.
It was published on a blog called Cup of Joe 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 weight.
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 honest, because there were times when I was scared to get on the scale and there has never been a wavering.
And, you know, 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 weight.
In fact, the previous boyfriend who was so 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.
Thank you.
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.
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 enter into is the person is going to change in appearance over time.
They just are, whether that's weight or wrinkles or gray hair or hair loss or whatever.
Sometimes disability, sometimes real, significant body changes.
Infermity, yep.
I mean, all kinds of stuff.
And so 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 close as possible over time, or else you're in trouble in the relationship.
I think that's really problematic.
And so I would caution you against acting on a few pounds in each direction.
And 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.
And I would say that it only went away because it was a trick of the mind that 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.
And I love that you had that intense bond.
But you heard Ashley say that it took a long time for her and her fiancé 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 was, 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 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 weight.
But if you're talking about spending a lifetime with somebody, like this is peanuts.
You need to be able to at least broach the subject and have the conversation about how he feels about his body.
I see a lot of you know this is how his weight gain is making me feel and I've seen this happen to other people and I'm scared.
You know, and those are all you know, to be perfectly honest, reasonable feelings.
But right now they all seem like you're making you're trying to make a lot of decisions about someone else by yourself.
Right.
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, uh, 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, and say hey, I've noticed maybe, that you've put on a little weight.
How do you feel about that?
Are you feeling okay?
Because sometimes a 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?
Physical attraction is important in a long-term relationship.
Isn't this the time for me to be questioning that?
And it is.
I think that your questions are valid.
But anyone who got married at 30 and then was still having sex with the person at 80 will tell you that they wouldn't have picked that 80-year-old back when they were 30.
Our bodies change over time.
Our personalities, to some degree, change over time.
Our interests will change over time.
Part of being in a long-term relationship is being open to the idea of seeing your partner anew.
And this is true in the physical realm as well.
And so I agree with Ashley's point here.
Be open, but also...
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 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 in other people.
And I get the feeling that this person is Um, might also be, you know, a little, a little bit thinking.
You know well, I didn't gain weight, or what if I gained weight?
How would my partner look at me?
And you know the reason why I wrote the essay I wrote and why.
You know I talk about my relationship with my boyfriend um, on the internet, with my fiance.
I'm having a really hard time sticking to that word.
Um, but on the internet and things like that is because I want to make it clear that 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.
Bye.
Dear Sugars is produced by the New York Times in partnership with WBUR.
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Our executive producer is Lisa Tobin.
And our editorial director is Samantha Hennig.
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