My Lover is Fat

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Jen went to a therapist and began eating again, but it was years before anyone realized what she did after she ate. Her anorexia had become bulimia, a far more insidious illness with its incessant vomiting and abuse of laxatives. In the meantime, I had discovered feminist theory. I took women's studies classes during my last year of college and read about the many kinds of oppression. I watched my sister; I made the connection. Furious, I resolved never to diet again. Jude, you're amazing, Jen would later tell me. 'You're the only woman I know who can eat ice cream. I mean, without throwing up afterward.'

It was one thing to have a political stance against fat oppression. It is quite another, I found, to have a fat lover.

The problem didn't arise in bed. I wanted her; there was no question about that. The problem came when I looked at her naked body after we had made love. The body I saw was not one I knew how to call beautiful. My lover's belly was distended; her thighs were thick. Around her face, she had a double, perhaps a triple, chin. In the past, I'd had lovers who, like most people, disliked their bodies. It had been one of my talents as a lover to change those feelings. I'd praised their bodies, loving them with words as well as touch. Now I wanted to do the same thing for my fat lover. Yet I could not tell her she was beautiful. 'I love your body,' I told her instead as I kissed her, licking and stroking her flesh. 'I love your body,' I repeated like a mantra, to ward away the persistent, ugly remnants of my disgust.

Later, as she gained more weight, my lover began to worry that there was a limit to how much fat I could love, or perhaps how much fat I could overlook.

'It's your essence I'm attracted to,' I assured her. 'No amount of weight you could gain or lose would change my feelings for you.'

And somewhere along the way, the judging portion of my brain grew thinner and thinner until, like a fingernail sliver of moon, it almost disappeared. 'You're beautiful,' I told my lover then, because it was true.

Later, as my lover's kidneys failed, I came to love her body in still other ways. Now that it had become a battleground, a locus of pain and discomfort rather than pleasure, I loved it in defiance, as if my passion could banish its ills. I loved it perhaps in the same way that some women love 'unavailable' men, because I could not reach it, even as I lay naked beside it.

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