Dear Playboy Author Boy,
I gained weight after having our kids and being in law school at the same time, so I am no longer the 110 lb girl he married, but again, he is the one who cheated. If he had come to me and said, “hey I am really unhappy with your weight gain,” I would have paid attention. I always wanted to exercise, but wanted to do things together as a family. He always went golfing with his buddies or joined basketball, football or softball leagues, and I was left at home with the kids and no real time for myself. I know it is too late, PBAB, but I must know, should I have stood up and demanded more for myself?
Signed,
Thicker But Not Yet Wiser in Michigan
Dear Thick Chick,
On a positive note, this divorce has given you much more insight into the male brain than you otherwise would have. Odds are, your husband did try to communicate to you that he was unhappy with your weight gain. That is what all the outside activity was about, that and more.
What was that, you ask? More than the weight gain?
Yes, dear. Weight gain is never about the food tasting better. Fat insulates us against something we fear or loathe. It can be a symptom of deep unhappiness and comfort food can be as addicting as alcohol or drugs, but I believe that weight signifies more than the other addictions. It is a class unto itself because you cannot run from your reflection every day. With every pound gained, you KNOW you are becoming unattractive to your mate, and yet you are okay with that. In a way, you are punishing yourself but you are punishing him more.
In many ways the American female’s weight gain with marriage and children is about hostility toward the husband. This weight gain is very common in the USA and yet it is unheard of elsewhere. I just returned from Milan and Genoa. The women there are slender no matter their age or marital status. Young or old, ugly or gorgeous, poor or fabulously wealthy, Italian women look scrumptious because there is so much less of them than American females. And it is not so much the comparison to American women, the issue is American MARRIED women. As you yourself said, when you were single and dating your future husband, you weighed 110 pounds. The added weight with children could do nothing except upset him, and you knew it. In the rare times that you are honest with yourself, I imagine that you admit that much of your emotions toward your husband during the time you were gaining weight consisted of hostility. Anger and annoyance. You subconsciously or deliberately decided to wreck his cute girlfriend. In letters made of fat, you wrote, “I hate you, asshole!”
Could that have been cured by you putting yourself first? Having more “me time”? I doubt it. Weight like the pounds you described tends to melt off the female frame when the ink on the divorce decree dries. Without the object of your hostility in front of you, you have no further use of the weight and your eating patterns change. Once again, you realize that if you look like a cow, you won’t attract that cute guy in accounting. You work out, eat right, lose weight, have positive thoughts about men (again) and you once more become attractive to men – perhaps not so much because of your weight loss, but because of your newfound “non-hating” attitude toward men.
I would also wager that during the period of time of your weight gain, you didn’t have much time for sex with your husband. Sure, you had a million damned good reasons. The kids are awake. I’m tired. I don’t feel sexy. The husband doesn’t help enough (there’s that “h” word again).
To interrupt myself, men hate the “h” word – you don’t HELP me enough with the kids, the housework, etc. Attention, females: the children were your idea and your project. YOU decided to either stay home with them full time or to ramp your career down to “mommy track” levels to be with the kids. You don’t help the husband with his sales projection spreadsheets or his monthly project report, so stop expecting him to be a maid and cook. As an experiment, one of my friends who was suffering from a sexual shutdown caused purportedly by lack of helping took on all the domestic chores to remove this excuse – he did all the housework, paid for the maid to deep clean once a week, cleaned up after the dogs, did the cooking, the laundry, the folding and putting-away duties, so that mommy only needed to do the one thing she didn’t need “help” with. Guess what? With all that time she got back, naps included, she found NEW excuses not to have sex with him. Now it was that HIM who had gained too much weight! Now HE wasn’t attractive to HER! End result? No sex. What is the inevitable result of no sex in a marriage?
Sexless marriages lead to marriage-less sex. Your husband will find it more and more difficult to fend off the sexual advances of Connie in accounts payable or Hilda the coffee shop girl. Or, like my friend’s case, the sex shutdown because of the same resentment that fuels the female weight gain caused the male to withdraw into himself and begin an affair with his own fantasies, in which his only relief was his hand. While there was no physical cheating going on in this case, the women in the husband’s mind were pornstars. The result is the same – the relationship becomes a wide gulf of resentment. Either one member of the union cheats, or fantasizes about cheating, and the true male-female connection dissolves. At that point, the marriage is a business partnership or a friendship or a brother-sister arrangement, but it is not romantic.
People in that eventuality tend to stay together to preserve their financial assets or to provide a loving family for the children, while leading lives of quiet desperation, or coping by self deception. They can’t get sex, so they tell themselves they aren’t that sexual. Either this continues until one of them dies, or they become vulnerable to overt sexual attention sniffed out by unethical members of the opposite sex who can tell that the marriage is sexless.
A friend of mine who found himself in a loveless, sexless marriage to a hostile overweight woman sought the advice of the ultimate counsel – his father. What did Dear Old Dad say? He slapped his son, called him a pussy, and said, “Do what countless generations of men have always done, you moron – get your needs satisfied outside of the marriage. Get a fucking mistress, for God’s sake, and keep it discreet. There’s no need to create a scandal in the family, and if you don’t look out for your needs, eventually some woman will and you won’t be in control of this and it will get ugly.” What did the man do? He took his father’s advice. But unfortunately the mistress got pregnant to try to pry the man out of his stale marriage. Soon my friend lost everything – his family shunned him, he got fired, he fought a two-front child support legal war, his wife moved 400 miles away with the kids. Eventually he found himself in a dark closet with the barrel of a .357 Magnum in his mouth. I second-guessed my own advice to him as they sprinkled holy water on his coffin on a day as grim as his life had become, a funeral his parents, ex and children refused to attend. The entire time his marriage headed toward that sexless, loveless scorched zone, I told him over and over:
Sit down with your wife. Look her in the eye and say, this marriage is no longer working. Let’s take this apart like the adults we are. I will be a good father to the kids and I expect you to be a good mother to them. I will be more than generous in child support, alimony and asset division. In return, I hope for no pettiness from you when it comes to visitation rights. In time perhaps we can even be friends and give each other advice. Please give me this divorce with honor and show me the character I know you have.
But he didn’t. He felt like the woman he married wouldn’t wait until the end of the speech before clanging him on the head with a frying pan. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? If you married someone who couldn’t hear you out on that speech, perhaps the whole marital quagmire is your fault. You picked that person who became your spouse, and now you want sympathy because that person became an asshole while subjected to a high dose of YOU.
Makes you think, doesn’t it? I know, very little comfort here, but remember one thing. You owe yourself happiness and you owe it to yourself and your children to get yourself to a place where you are happy. Otherwise, it will be you who have holy water sprinkled on your casket while no one watches.
Playboy Author Boy
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