Letters to the Editor
Sandra M
Published Letters: 578 Editor's Choice: 139
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A shallow person ignores opportunity for analysis and reflection and chooses on the basis of status without regard to the true feelings of the self or the prospective beloved
[Read the article: Help! I'm falling for a fat man!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't think being turned off by fat is necessarily a product of media fat bashing or being freaked out or any other sort of other-directed indoctrination. Some people are not only not bothered by fat but are turned on by it. Some people are only turned on by blondes, by fake boobs, by tallness, whatever. In the John Irving novel "A Widow For One Year" a character was only turned on by women 20+ years older than himself - he was repeating the first great love affair of his life over and over, when he was 16 and she was 40.
The thing is, we all have our imago - a person who is some ideal combination of physical and behavioral characteristics that produces a sexual frisson that starts deep in the sub-conscious. For most of us, sexual preferences is such a complex combination of personality, deep-seated psychological issues from developmental experiences, self-esteem and other factors so as to be as undiscoverable as the soul, as unalterable as genetics. It's no more shallow than being born short, redheaded, or with a proclivity for mathematics.
Sometimes sexual proclivities are a simple by-produce of experience. But even the same petri dish can breed vastly different responseos. Some people respond to their lack of wide experience with great curiosity and a sense of adventure - the boy from the midwest farm who never saw a person of color until age 17 finds himself almost exclusively attracted to 'exotic' women, and to his dismay is written off as having 'jungle fever' or an 'Asian fetish' because of his intense appreciation, interest in, curiosity for what is different from his experience. That same boy could have a brother who is utterly immune to the potential charms of anyone other than a white girl from the midwest; it is what he is familiar with, and the familiar is what he responds to. Neither is wrong.
Fat is for many a more loaded issue even than color or religion. We aren't born obese; we get there through behavior that can only be described as self-defeating. This is an idea so alien to many as to inspire a very primal repulstion/fear- that people will, despite their strongest desires and wishes, operate against their own best interest and happiness.
Finding fat people unattractive is not wholly a product of the times, else everyone would be equally turned off, and that's not the case. I look around me and see that most people are coupled up despite being overweight, often significantly so. Part of your lack of attraction might simply be due to the lack of empathy, i.e. you can't relate to being fat - not emotionally, not physically. I have friends that don't date outside of their race or religion for the same reason - a lack of empathy or curiosity makes sexual attraction pretty difficult.
LW, stop scolding yourself for being shallow. Shallow would be refusing to even get to know him well enough to find out if a connection exists. You didn't do that - you invested time and energy and emotion in him and found a connection did exist. Unfortunately, it didn't give rise to sexual attraction. You can't make yourself be attracted to him, and making yourself endure him is a great disservice to your connection, to him and also to yourself. I'd think about all you value about him and your connection; let is swell your heart. Then make love with him one more time; do everything with him. Touch him everywhere, really *see* him and *feel* him, and be aware of all of your feelings as you do so. Is the emotional resonance of being with him drowned out by the static of 'not feeling it' phsyically/sexually? If so and you decide to end it, I wouldn't tell him the truth. As Cary and other responders say - he either knows he's fat and hasn't been able to do anything about it, or he doesn't know and is fine with himself. Either way, no reason to potentially savage his self-esteem. Find a kindly variety of 'It's me, not you."
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I'm curious about the husband
[Read the article: Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]....he ignored her pleas for help and insisted she home school and continue breeding. Yeah, she's the one who drowned them. But no one has trouble blaming the Holocaust on Hitler and he wasn't exactly an employee manning one of the camps. In fact, history has him only (and *maybe*) killing one person. So what about the husband? Doesn't he have some responsibility here for protecting his children, even if/especially if that entails ensuring the wife exhibiting psychotic symptoms is getting treatment and medication? I'm curious why he is treated as a mere onlooker, as if Andrea had suddenly and w/out warning murdered her children in a passionate burst of unpredictable physical and emotional energy, instead of at the end of a slow, easily mapped slide into psychosis.