“You know what I like about you? Youve get fat pride. I felt that way, too, until I realized I wanted anyone to fuck me ever.”
Wed been talking online for weeks he was funny, erudite, nerdy, kind. Hed told me hed lost weight in the past. Id done my due diligence of telling him how fat I was, working hard to avoid recur of past hurt and letdown. Id weeded through dozens of profiles about wanting to meet “healthy, ” “active” women and several that pointedly instructed that fat females werent welcome. Many humen had sent graphic, sexual messages, and when I politely declined or didnt answer, they issued lengthy screeds. “U SHOULD BE GRATEFUL.” “I wouldnt even rape you.”
In amongst all of that, Id saw someone who seemed like a gem. And then, on our first real date, this . It was frustrating, isolating, and made me feel so big and so small, all at the same hour.
I gently pushed back. “You know youre saying that about me, too, right? “
“What? ”
“When you talk about no one wanting to fuck fat people, youre talking about me, too.”
He shook his head. “Dont take it personally. Its not personal.”
I get quiet then asked for the check. He said hed stroll me out. When we got outside, he tried to kiss me then asked if I wanted to go back to his place .
Years afterward, I was falling for a new partner.
Wed been dating for several months, and she was extraordinary: full of life, wildly intelligent, absurdly beautiful. Id tell her often maybe too often how stunning I believed she was. With equal frequency, shed talk about my body. “Youre so brave to dress the route you do.” “I want you to feel empowered.”
At first, her responses voiced like reciprocity, but they always seemed to sting. I felt deflated every time she said it. Like that first date, she couldnt ensure past my body. She valued me, but she didnt longing me. When she spoke, she never spoke about my body only about my are relevant to it. She was amazed that I wasnt sucked into the undertow of self-loathing and isolation that she expected from fat girls. Those remarks were a reminder of how frequently she thought of my body , not as an object of passion, but as an impediment to overcome. She was impressed that I could. She could not.
When you and I talk about dating, dear friend, we have a lot of overlapping experiences because dating can be difficult and awkward for anyone.
Its a strange auditioning process: all artifice to find someone who can respect your uncrossable lines, and failed auditions usually mean those lines get traversed. Its easy to feel judged, stalled, alone in the process. It can get depleting, exciting, frustrating, exhilarating.
But dating as a fat person means contending with so many added layers of challenge .
You told me once you imagined it was unable to to date as a fat person. Its not; its just a lot of run. Plenties of people are willing to sleep with fat people. Many are willing to date a fat person.
Few are willing to truly embrace a fat person. Almost no one, it seems, actually knows what that entails.
That first date, dear friend, is such a frequent moment.
My sweet, funny date was abruptly deposed, overtaken by years of the same anti-fat messages all of us hear. He couldnt reconcile being fat and being loved. All of that, abruptly, was visited upon me, as it so often is.
I merely bring up my feelings about being a fat person after knowing someone for some time. But, with startling regularity, new acquaintances, dates, and strangers offer diet advice, trial gym memberships, and, even once, a recommendation for a surgeon. My life as a fat person is a barrage of weekly, daily, and hourly offers of unsolicited advice. At first, the detailed answers, the constant defense, the explanation of my daily diet and medical history are ineffective no answer is sufficient. Over day, it becomes burdensome, then exhausting, then frustrating. And it doesnt seem to cross the minds of most people I fulfill that Ive heard what theyve said before not just once, but over and over again, in great detail. I have a forced expertise in diets, exercise regimens, miracle pills, and the science of weight loss.
That may not be your experience, dear friend, because people may approach you differently.
You might not know what its like to feel your face flush or your heart race when your body so reliably becomes a topic of conversation during dinner parties, work events, first dates. Theres a familiar wave of annoyance, hurt, and exhaustion. Its all the visceral, invisible repercussion of unintended harm because few of us even you, my darling have unlearned the scripts were expected to recite when we ensure a body like mine.
As a fat girl, I simply want what anyone else wants : to be seen, to be loved, to be supported for who I am. To be challenged and adore. To be worth the effort for who I am.
When I gratify people whose first response to me is about my fat body, I learn something important about that person. Whether their opening salvo is “Fat bitch” or “Im worried about your health” or “Have you tried this diet? ” or “I think youre beautiful, ” they all send the same message: that I am invisible. Rather than considering me or getting to know who I am, they can only assure my fat body.
Its true of so many people I fulfill. Theyve get this deep-seated block: They cant insure fat people as individual people with individual narratives because no one expects them to. Nothing in our culture indicates that fat people might have individual experiences, different tales, life experiences as rich and varied as anyone else. Instead, were met with diagnosis, prognosis, quarantine: an anthropological impulse to demand to know why we are the route we are and to figure out how to stop us from having the bodies we have. Were reduced to figures in an equation, a puzzle to solve. But truthfully, were so much messier than that. Were just as contradictory, real, and human as anyone else you know, and loving us is as complicated.
When we have conversations like this, you often say, “I had no idea.”
Its heartening, dear friend, and its also hard to hear. Its a harsh reminder that even those closest to me are subject to all those same influences and impulses.
Theres so much work in only working up the mettle to date at all. Building your own confidence and combating your own doubt enough to date at all can be difficult, in part because theres no template. Media representation is severely absence for many communities; insuring prospering fat people in media is nearly nonexistent. Being fat entails not seeing yourself reflected anywhere as being happy, healthy, or confirmed.
Being fat entails taking on the Sisyphean task of creating your own world, one in which you are able to declare a truce with yourself and learn to feel OK or feel nothing at all about yourself when the entire world seems to be telling you that is not possible.
It means finding whatever you can scavenge to build yourself some makeshift shelter of thatch and driftwood. Its brittle and dry, and its something. You try to build something that can withstand the gale-force gales of insuring an episode of “The Biggest Loser” or hearing a stranger offer unsolicited diet advice that youre already taking. You construct it slowly, painstakingly testing the methodologies and meet rare, essential materials over period. Its precious and fragile, a labor of love and a means of survival.
And discovering project partners means opening that hard-fought home to someone else, over and over again, knowing that person might destroy it.
Usually, they do.
Youve mourned it a hundred times. Your scalp has thickened. Sometimes that person burns it to the ground, defining a flame to watch it burn. But more often, they just forget to extinguish their cigarette. Yes, when we look for love, some of us are hurt intentionally, cruelly, because of our bodies and because of overt fatphobia. But usually, were hurt without malice, through rote scripts about who were allowed to be and an expectation that well dedicate our lives to meeting those expectations.
Often, when go looking for friends and partners, I search for those who will be gentle with the home Ive built, ramshackle though it is.
What made such an impression on my partner from decades ago was that I didnt stop there: I wanted someone who would help build that home, someone who would protect it, someone who would call it their home, too. Because a lack of harm isnt love.
I want love. And as a fat person, theres boldnes in that.
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