We moved back to Seattle a few weeks after that. We rented a house and settled into a routine, our pre-breakup life already distant and foreign, like it happened to someone else. Every day I take his face in my hands and squeeze, because I think he might be a mirage; he declares “Crab Fingers,” his second-favorite game, and pinches me until I fall out of bed. I call him and say gross stuff like, “I want to hug you and kiss you!” and he goes, “Who is this? Jessynthia?” and pretends to have a secret family. We show our love in different ways. But being in love holds its own kind of challenges.
Once, Aham and I were sitting at a bar, holding hands, and a woman recognized me. She was a fan of my writing, so she came up to introduce herself, and we shambled through a few minutes of pleasant chitchat. Sensing the conversation was running out of steam, she asked me one of the questions that people always ask me in those awkward, floundering moments: “So, what’s it like to work from home? Aren’t you lonely?”
“Not really,” I said. I gestured to Aham. “He works from home, too. It’s hard to feel alone when there’s a guy constantly playing the trumpet in your face.”
She laughed and turned to him. “So, you two are roommates?”
Yes, lady. We are platonic adult roommates who hold hands at bars. This is, clearly, the only logical explanation. Actually, since you asked, I recently sustained a pulsing gash to the palm and he’s just holding the wound closed until paramedics arrive. Also, every night before bed, a rattlesnake bites me on the mouth and he has to suck out the poison. It’s the weirdest thing. We should probably move.
I wasn’t surprised that this woman took so many willful leaps past “couple” and landed on “roommates” in her split-second sussing-out of our relationship—it happens all the time. But it was a disheartening reminder of an assumption that has circumscribed my life: Couples ought to “match.” Aham and I do not. I am fat and he is not. He is conventionally desirable and I am a “before” picture in an ad for liquefied bee eggs that you spray on your food to “tell cravings to buzz off!” (COPYRIGHTED. SEND ME ALL THE MONEY.) It is considered highly unlikely—borderline inconceivable—that he would choose to be with me in a culture where men are urged to perpetually “upgrade” to the “hottest” woman within reach, not only for their own supposed gratification but also to impress and compete with other men. It is women’s job to be decorative (within a very narrow set of parameters) and it is men’s job to collect them. My relationship throws off both sides of that equation, and a lot of people find it bewildering at best, enraging at worst.
There are long, manic message board threads devoted to comparing photos of me with photos of Aham’s thin, conventionally pretty second ex-wife (number one is blessedly absent from the old MySpace page he doesn’t know how to take down; number two is not so lucky), and dissecting what personality disorder could possibly have caused him to downgrade so egregiously. Servers always assume we want separate checks. Women hit on him right in front of me—and the late-night Facebook messages are a constant—as though they could just “have” him and he would say, “Oh, thank god you finally showed up,” and leave me, and some dire cosmic imbalance would be corrected. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that they “match.” They can talk about hot-people problems together—like “too many clothing options” and “haters.” I wouldn’t understand.
It’s not that I’m not attracted to fat men—I’ve dated men of all sizes—but the assumption that fat people should only be with fat people is dehumanizing. It assumes that we are nothing but bodies. Well, sorry. I am a human and I would like to be with the human I like the best. He happens to not be fat, but if he were, I would love him just the same. Isn’t that the whole point? To be more than just bodies?
When I think back on my teenage self, what I really needed to hear wasn’t that someone might love me one day if I lost enough weight to qualify as human—it was that I was worthy of love now, just as I was. Being fat and happy and in love is still a radical act. That’s why a wedding mattered to me. Not because of a dress or a diamond or a cake or a blender. (Okay, maybe a cake.*)
Aham took me out for dinner on my thirty-second birthday, then suggested a “quick nightcap” at our neighborhood bar. Everyone was there—it was a surprise—our friends, our families, the kids, a cake. I was so happy. Aham took my hand and led me to the back; there was a paper banner that said my name (the bartender made it—we go there a lot); our friends Evan and Sam were playing a duet on cello and bass. I was confused. Why were there somber strings at my birthday party? Why was Aham doing Intense Face? Wait, it’s almost ten p.m. on a school night and we’re at a bar—why ARE the kids here? Then it all happened at once: the knee, the ring, the speech, the question, the tears. All the hits. It was a full-blown grand gesture.
He tricked me! He said five years. I was ready to wait five years. He only lasted two.
Later, I asked him why he did it that way—such a big spectacle, such an event, not precisely our style—and I expected something cliché but sweet, like, “I wanted to make sure our community was a part of our marriage,” or, “I wanted everyone to know how much I love you.” Instead, he said, “One time when you were drunk you told me, ‘If you ever propose to me, don’t do it in the bullshit way that dudes usually treat fat girls. Like it’s a secret, or you’re just trying to keep me from leaving you. Thin girls get public proposals, like those dudes are winning a fucking prize. Fat chicks deserve that, too.’”
It’s not that I’d ever particularly yearned for a grand gesture—the relationship I cherish lives in our tiny private moments—but the older I get and the longer I live in a fat body, the harder it is to depoliticize even simple acts. A public proposal to a publicly valued body might be personally significant, but culturally it shifts nothing. A public proposal to a publicly reviled body is a political statement.
As soon as you start making wedding plans, you’re bombarded with (among a million other beckoning money pits) a barrage of pre-wedding weight-loss programs. Because you’re supposed to be as thin as possible on your special day. After all, there will be pictures! And what if someone remembers your butt as looking like what your butt looks like!? “I’m only eating grapefruit and steam until my wedding.” “I enrolled my whole wedding party in bridal boot camp.” “I bought my dress in a size 4 even though I’m a size 6.” And that’s totally fine, of course, if that’s your priority. It wasn’t mine.
I don’t hide anymore in my everyday life, and I definitely wasn’t going to hide at my wedding.