I Just Found Out Why My Boyfriend Won’t Have Sex With Me, and I’m Devastated
He assures me he still loves me and doesn't want to leave me. How do I get past this?
Dear How to Do It,
I (30s, F) have been dating my boyfriend (30s, M) for a little over two years. The relationship is overall amazing; he’s funny, incredibly handsome, loving, and supportive. Like many others, our sex life has taken a pretty substantial hit over the last year. In addition to COVID, my boyfriend went through some periods of unemployment and general anger at the state of the world. He’s been doing much better recently, and I had hoped our sex life would pick up again. It hasn’t, and recently I found out why—I’ve gained weight, and he’s no longer attracted to me.
I’m devastated. He assures me he still loves me and doesn’t want to leave me, but he doesn’t have any ideas how to get back on track other than for me to lose the weight. And while I’ve gained substantial weight since we’ve been dating (about 35 pounds and two dress sizes), it’s been hard won. I started recovery for my eating disorders about three years ago, and I was finally starting to feel like I was gaining at least a sense of neutrality about my body. Yes, I’d put on weight, but I no longer wept for hours with hatred at my appearance, counted every calorie, exercised to the point of injury, or kept losing my hair. At the same time though, I know the weight gain is my fault, and it’s not his fault for losing his attraction to me.
I think he feels bad about this admission, as we’ve had sex more since then than in the previous three months combined. But I just … don’t want to any more. I want to cry and hide my body every time we get intimate. He suggests that I can blow him or get him off instead, but I don’t exactly feel in the mood to do that. It just makes me feel like his fat sex toy—and not in a hot way.
How do I get past this? Other than losing the weight (which I’m trying to do, but it’s just so triggering), how can I bring the spark back? I’m trying to work through this with my therapist, but I just don’t know how to go forward from here.
—Hot Potato
Dear Hot Potato,
In any context, pressure to lose weight sucks. Given your history with eating disorders, it is dangerous. And so, I enlisted the help of clinical social worker/sex therapist Sonalee Rashatwar, who is known on Instagram as the Fat Sex Therapist and does a lot of speaking and thinking about issues pertaining to body size. (Rashatwar’s YouTube video from 2019 “Fatphobia Is Not a Sexual Preference” is particularly pertinent to your case.) Rashatwar told me that it seems like what your boyfriend is offering is conditional attraction based on your weight. What worries me about your attempt to lose weight, especially while guided by the logic that the weight gain is your “fault” and that it is “not his fault” for not being attracted to your bigger body, is that you are effectively condemning yourself to a lifetime of upkeep where anything less than perfection is unacceptable. As Rashatwar points out, 35 pounds isn’t that much, and one could reasonably expect leeway from a long-term partner here given the human body’s tendency toward change throughout life. “It’s inhumane to have an expectation that your partner’s body should not change,” said Rashatwar.
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It’s troubling to see you position this as your problem to solve. Rashatwar argues that the problem is your boyfriend’s. “It’s really helpful for the person who’s experiencing the loss of attraction—in this case the boyfriend—to be working on his own with a therapist, with some kind of professional, to help understand that his attraction is conditioned,” they explained. “What he’s attracted to is quite flexible and the way he’s approaching this relationship is really rigid.” While there is no science (yet) for determining precisely why people are attracted to whom they are, what Rashatwar says tracks. Certainly, we live in a world that is hostile to fat people and when someone’s sexual taste so aligns with the status quo, it is impossible to definitively divorce societal influence from what is perceived as innate attraction. At any rate, this is an opportunity for your boyfriend to interrogate his attraction, a logical prospect as many people find that what they’re into changes over time.
And though you describe your relationship as “overall amazing,” your mention of your boyfriend’s anger gave both Rashatwar and me pause. “Esther Perel talks about how we only will address [an issue] when it hits the sex area, but I would bet that she’s probably experiencing this emotional rupture in other areas, too,” they said. “Abuse might be a strong word, but there are layers of control—at least manipulation, and her body autonomy is not under her control here.” Rashatwar suggested that a term they coined, body-image abuse, might not be so far off in describing your situation. “Because it doesn’t look like physical violence, we don’t consider it abusive, but this is one person trying to have too much control over another person’s body,” they said. “That’s essentially what abuse is over time: the consistent need to have control over someone else’s body. Body-image abuse can look like a whole spectrum of things.”
So instead of only making you bend to him, and selfishly requesting oral sex, he’s going to have to come to you if the relationship has a future. Certainly, a relationship that requires you to live adjacent to the eating disorder you’re recovering from, if not fully relapse, is not a tenable one. Rashatwar was not convinced that couples counseling was appropriate here, as you’re already in individual counseling and, by your account, not doing anything to disturb the peace of your relationship. However, I did reach out to a psychologist who specializes in nutritional issues, and he suggested couples counseling as an option. Martin Binks, professor and director of the Nutrition & Metabolic Health Initiative at Texas Tech University, wrote in an email that he applauded your seeking of individual counseling as “your comfort and self-acceptance are most important.” He added: “I understand how difficult your partner’s comments are—I strongly suggest you seek a couples therapist to help you both accurately communicate your feelings to each other. Perhaps there are other reasons for the loss of attraction and weight is just the one that is most obvious to focus on for him. It goes without saying that physical attraction in relationships waxes and wanes over time, and couples struggle to balance this with the other things that are important to them. Communication is key.”
So there are some options for you. Please don’t put yourself in danger over 35 pounds and the acceptance of another. You’re worth way more, and it might take you removing yourself from this situation to honor and preserve said worth.
(she/they) soft butch enby
-nali” like “Somali”
philly
DMs
sonaleer.com
rad fat lib + donut superfan
" rating back. Holy shit, no wonder nobody would stick their dick in her.
