body
Could your
weight be
messing
with your
marrıage?
We’re supposed to love someone through good times and bad, illness
and success, but we don’t make any vows about pant size. Still, as Paula
Derrow discovered, extra pounds can tip the balance of a relationship.
Illustrations by Brian Stauffer
I
was hot right before I got married, or at least my version
of hot: fifteen pounds down from when I first met my
husband, teetering on the edge of a size 8 (a milestone
for me). In our wedding photos, my stomach looks flat in
my fitted dress, my arms toned, my cheekbones visible.
Nearly three years later, I have put those pounds back on.
You could surmise that means I’m content with my newish
husband and you’d be right: A 2013 study from Southern
Methodist University in Dallas found that partners in happy
unions are more apt to gain weight early on, because they
no longer feel as if they have to be thin to attract a mate.
That sounds nice, but I’m not pleased I’ve gone up a size
(or two). I can tell that Randy, my high-energy/low-bodyfat husband, doesn’t like it much either. The other day, I
mentioned how I missed having a gym membership since
moving to our new town. “Well, why don’t I pay for you to
get a personal trainer—it will be your birthday present!”
he offered. I was about to thank him profusely, when he
continued, “It will be a present that benefits both of us.”
“Um, what do you mean?” I asked warily.
“Well, you’ll feel better and I’ll enjoy looking at you.”
I gave him an icy smile, which, lucky for him, he interpreted
correctly, because he quickly backtracked. “It’s not that I
don’t love looking at you now, it’s just that...”
“You’d better stop there,” I warned, trying to sound as if
I were joking. Which I wasn’t.
There have been other tiny humiliations. When I asked
Randy to guess my weight (bad idea—don’t try it at home),
he was right on the nose. So much for my thinking I look
thinner than I am. And I admit: When the scale disappoints
me, I’m more likely to slip under the covers and reach for
a book than for him. Instead of marriage making me feel
secure in my body, I am vaguely ashamed that I’m not the
woman I was on the day we tied the knot. Marriage is an
ever-evolving entity, but when those changes occur around
the waistline, marital tensions get bigger, too.
Gains on the scale, losses in the bedroom
Of course happy couples need to accept one another, but
in the real world, that acceptance can be tough to find.
“The person whose weight hasn’t changed may feel a little
resentful,” confirms Constance Quinn, site director of the
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body
Renfrew Center of New York City, which treats women
with eating disorders. A study at the University of Arizona
in Tucson found that once a major weight disparity exists
between partners, conflict often follows. And couples in
which the woman is overweight argue more than healthyweight couples or pairs where only the man is heavy.
Take Melanie, 40, who doesn’t want to use her full name
here. After her second child was born, the scale crept up to
250 pounds from the 175 she weighed on her wedding day a
decade earlier. “I hoped that my extra pounds would come
off with nursing, but they didn’t, and it started to become
an issue in my marriage,” says the Pennsylvania mom.
Physical intimacy took a nosedive. “We basically didn’t
have a sex life,” she says. “I assumed it was because we
were both tired, but one night
he blurted out, ‘I’m not into having sex because of your weight.’
I was like, How dare you? ‘Not
gaining weight’ wasn’t part of
our wedding vows.”
The truth-telling got worse
from there. “He admitted that
it really bugged him that I
wasn’t doing anything about
my weight,” she says. What made
it worse was that her husband
had packed on pounds too—50,
in fact. “He’d run and go on
these Atkins kicks and lose 20
pounds, then point out how
easy it was,” Melanie says. “But
he’d inevitably gain the weight
back. I accepted that in him,”
she says. “It happens.” Melanie
had been completely committed
No matter
to her marriage and family—
what you
weigh, shame
“I thought that the only deal
about your
breaker would be infidelity or
body can hold
you back.
physical abuse”—but now she
wondered. She felt “unsupported
and rotten.”
The couple did what many do when they’re having difficulties: They withdrew emotionally. “I felt like he was a
shallow person, someone I didn’t know at all,” Melanie
says. “Frankly, I thought that it was only a matter of time
before I left him. In my heart, I knew he had a point,” she
concedes. “But I was still pissed off.”
her son, she couldn’t shake the 20 extra pounds of baby
weight. Her husband didn’t say a word about her curvier
figure, but “I was depressed,” she says, and his silence only
made her feel worse. “I felt like on one hand, I should be
grateful that he didn’t seem to care. He was always sweet.
But on the other hand, he didn’t notice me. [His silence]
made me feel not close to him and not want to have sex.”
I also know that when I’m heavier, my libido plummets.
“Whatever you weigh, the more shame you feel about your
body, the less sexually satisfied you’ll feel,” says Joan Chrisler,
Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Connecticut College in
New London. “You can’t focus on lovemaking if you are
worried about how you look.”
That shame is corrosive. “The problem isn’t the extra
pounds but the withdrawal that
follows,” says Mary Beth George,
a couples counselor in Houston.
When Kara Richardson, 40, of
Summit, NJ, gained back the
120 pounds she’d lost a few years
into her marriage, she and her
husband—astoundingly—didn’t
discuss it. “I didn’t bring it up,
because I didn’t want to give
him a reason to bring it up,”
she says.
But, warns George, “When
you hide part of yourself, it interferes with intimacy,” and not just
in the bedroom. “When I weigh
more, I don’t feel like going out
or doing the usual things we
do together, like hiking,” Kara
says. Being heavy gets in the
way of her happiness—and
her confidence. “Sometimes
I worry that my husband will
go to work, meet some skinny
Minnie on the train, and never
come back.”
If Kara could express that kind of fear—a fear that sometimes haunts me as well—“it might spark a larger discussion,” says Quinn. “That’s important, because a significant
weight gain is almost always a function of something deeper:
depression, anxiety, dealing with a milestone, like having
kids or losing a job. It’s never only about the food.”
The toughest talk a couple never has
Just as a major weight gain can divide a couple, so can a
dramatic weight loss. “I was more than 250 pounds when
my husband and I met and he totally wanted me, which
was thrilling,” says Christina (not her real name), 35, who
lives in California. But when she started thinking about
It can be incredibly difficult to even have a conversation
about weight—cue the fights and self-loathing—yet keeping
silent is no better. Tsan Merritt-Poree Abrahamson was a
slim 112 pounds when she married at 37. But after she had
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Are we what we weigh?
having a baby, she realized she’d have
to lose weight. “If I couldn’t take care
of myself, how could I take care of a
child?” she asks.
Christina ended up dropping 100
pounds. The more she lost, the more
her husband withdrew. “He became
totally uninterested in the bedroom,”
she says. There were other problems
(for one, her spouse was ambivalent
about having kids), but Christina says
her weight loss was a major factor in
their eventual divorce. “As much as you
want to think that your love is based on
a soul connection, weight, especially
for women, is so tied to identity. When
I was sexy to the world and not just
him, my ex couldn’t handle it,” she says.
I, for one, believe with all my heart
I’m not
about to lose
weight for a
man. But I want
to feel proud of
my body.
that it’s delusional to expect the person you marry to remain forever hot,
thin, or even fat, if hot, thin, or fat is
what they were in the first place. Still,
unlike the other things that happen to a
person over time that seem largely out
of our control—wrinkles, a scary diagnosis—this is, theoretically, something
we can impact. “I think that when you
are in a committed relationship, you
have a responsibility to be healthy,” says
Quinn. “Part of the marriage contract
is for two people to go through this life
together and bear witness to their joint
experience. But change needs to start
from within—the partner’s role is to
support that change.”
When Melanie started losing weight,
it was for reasons that were ultimately
about her, not her anger at her husband.
“I have an obligation to try and stay
healthy, if not skinny,” she says. “For
some women, that might mean maintaining their wedding-day weight. For
me, it meant being thin enough so that
I could get up on the monkey bars with
my daughter without thinking twice.”
And so she began going to gym
class—with an eye on a life without her
husband. “After he told me my weight
was a problem for him, I knew I had to
be ready to live on my own,” she says.
After she lost 20 pounds, “he started
coming up behind me when I was doing
the dishes. Part of me thought, I can’t
believe that this is all it takes for you to
start seeing me as your wife again! But
truthfully, I’d missed it.”
Then her husband suggested that the
two of them take up running. “We did
our first 5K together,” Melanie says. That
led to more races, and the beginning
of a new kind of happiness together.
“Our sex life is better now that we’ve
both lost weight,” she says. And they’ve
rediscovered their bond as a family. “He
always makes sure the kids are standing on the sidelines, cheering me on,”
she says. Melanie adds that they are
talking more openly, too. “I’ve gotten
better at saying, ‘I don’t need you to
fix me.’ It’s about my needing to feel
better about myself. It took him being
a shallow jerk for me to get that.”
I get that too. I’m a feminist, dammit,
and I’m not about to lose weight for a
man. But if my extra pounds are making
me unhappy, it’s time to do something
about them. Because whatever Randy
thinks about how I look naked, I want
to feel the way I felt on my wedding
day: proud of my body, of my strength.
As my husband likes to tell me, one
of the reasons he fell in love with me
is that I’m a strong woman, a woman
who can do amazing things when she
sets her mind to them.
So I think I’ll accept my spouse’s gift
of a personal trainer. Instead of viewing the offer as a criticism, I’ll view it
as a gesture of love, which I know it is.
I owe it to my spouse, to our sex life,
and to our marriage. But mostly, I owe
it to myself. R
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