That Darn Internalized Fatphobia, Part Two

 

Content Warning: It’s pretty mild, but I do talk a little bit about my relationship to food restrictions here. If that would feel yucky to read, please skip!

As has been amply and knottily documented here, The Shy One had, last I saw, a cute tummy, but over time, the rest of him became more and more of a traditional sculpture. (Oh, the butt! I still think religions should rise up around it!) Most of the time, it was easy to believe I was beautiful to him, that he wanted me. But with the added complications of closetedness, alongside his natural reserve in public, I sometimes landed on the conclusion that he was ashamed of me, ashamed of my body.

In retrospect, I think maybe he had some shames about himself, and I was getting them by emotional contagion. Is emotional contagion real? Are mirror neurons? How do I know when I’m projecting and when I’m picking up cues?

Anyway, once when we were talking about our goals for 2023, he mentioned wanting to lose the “quarantine weight” and get in better shape. This was his business! I don’t know why it triggered me, but it did. I texted after to ask if we could take diet talk off the table. Whether or not he meant the weight loss talk as indirect advice for me (he did not) it felt like pressure to keep up.

He kindly agreed and affirmed my beautifulness, but I kinda wishe I’d kept the topic open. Why is it so normal and culturally encouraged to do weight loss talk, but SO fraught to bring up fat liberation stuff? Practice, I guess?

It should have had no effect on me that he started eating less, particularly less sugar. It felt a little sad that he didn’t want to have a glass of wine with me anymore. He got more serious about his gym habits. Once, when I teased him (probably shouldn’t have) for putting a tiny amount of syrup on his pancakes, he looked at me with such contempt that it bordered on hatred! I can never know what emotional place that look came from, but it stopped me in my tracks and a little bit of our connection (and my connection to myself!) felt frozen solid.

I think it’s really weird that his dieting would land on me so intensely—it’s not like he was dieting AT me! I was already feeling trapped by the relationship hierarchy we were in, so some implied hierarchy about our body sizes might just have been just too much, another reason, paradoxically, to feel small. I tried to bring it up once, how I felt self-conscious eating in front of him because I was fat and he was thin. He just stared me down and said “You think I’m a thin person?” and that was the end of that.

Part of the story here was that I don’t think I was supposed to raise ANY kind of issues. I think he wanted my home and my body to be a place away from effort, away from conflict, away from the stresses and the divisions of the outside world. That fantasy is both sweet and dehumanizing. I think it would have been so lovely if we’d found ways to talk about our commonalities and differences lovingly and like it wasn’t the end of the world. That’s a tall order, but I don’t see any other way to be whole people together.

The last weekend of my thing with The Shy One, I watched the movie You People, a romcom about a Black woman and a Jewish man whose families and backgrounds make it hard to get along. I’m not comparing fatness to either of those identities, but the way the couple and the other characters Talked About THE STUFF seemed so beautiful to me. I think that’s how you stay together with anyone, lover, friend or family. (It’s also the movie wherein I discovered Frank Ocean’s cover of Moon River, MVP of my Grief Mix!)

By the time The Shy One and I were getting ready for our first weekend getaway, I was pretty freaked about how I was going to manage three whole days of eating in front of him. Like, what if I needed/wanted a snack and he wasn’t hungry? The anxiety had me completely stumped.

I think part of that nervousness can be attributed to the “butterflies” of love and attraction, but also that guy just stressed me the fuck out.

Today, I’m feeling afraid that these issues and tensions will keep me separate from men even when I’m ready to get closer. I talked about it with Summer Therapist and it was no surprise that (From the pages of Duh magazine!) childhood with my abusive, controlling, uncommunicative dad was part of the fear, the feeling of surveillance, the worry that I would never, ever get it right.

So maybe I’ll write about that tomorrow.