{"id":331,"date":"2018-02-26T15:34:30","date_gmt":"2018-02-26T15:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bettybutch.com\/?p=331"},"modified":"2020-07-06T18:11:22","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T18:11:22","slug":"getting-married-while-being-fat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bettybutch.com\/index.php\/2018\/02\/26\/getting-married-while-being-fat\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Married While Being Fat"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month, Buster and I are celebrating our first wedding anniversary. We\u2019ve been together over ten years, but queers have only been able to get married \u2018round these parts since mid-2015 and we were too poor to hop right to it when the Supreme Court finally got of its ass. I knew I wanted to write about getting married this month, I just wasn\u2019t entirely sure what I wanted to talk about\u2026 Then Weight Watchers pulled some gross bullshit<\/a> and I realized I wanted to talk about getting married while being fat.<\/p>\n

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[Description: A cropped picture of two white nonbinary people standing barefoot in the ocean, holding hands, with the wind blowing their black dresses.]<\/figcaption><\/figure>This ramble is intended for an audience that already understands fat people are human beings who deserve respect, so if you\u2019re not part of that audience\u2026 get the fuck off my blog.<\/p>\n

Getting Married While Being Fat<\/em><\/h4>\n

My mother got married for the second time when I was around 12 or 13. The wedding was quickly planned and on a tight budget, so she impulsively bought a dress that was too small for her at a thrift store. She was hoping that she could \u201cslim down\u201d to suit its sizing in the few weeks before the wedding. And while I don\u2019t remember much from the ceremony itself, I do remember my mother\u2019s anxiety leading up to it. Despite her attempts to lose weight, she only managed to gain more, and absolutely hated the way she looked in the dress. Her weight fluctuation was actually the symptom of a medical issue that wouldn\u2019t get addressed for years (howdy, anti-fat bias in the health care industry<\/a>!), but at the time, it was a source of shame and anger.<\/p>\n

Weddings and women dieting are almost undivorceable in my mind. Growing up, I overheard cousins exchange diet tips and unabashedly critique each other\u2019s bodies every time one of them got engaged. My favorite movie genre \u2013 romantic comedies \u2013 is overflowing with frantic, comedically-framed scenes centered on diet-desperate brides-to-be. Every grocery check-out line I\u2019ve ever stood in has been littered with magazines promising thinness in time to say \u201cI do.\u201d Even when I peruse gay wedding or engagement tags on Instagram, I see the haggard selfies of queer women announcing their dieting progress, some doing it together like it\u2019s just another part of planning for the ceremony. Like bodies are as normal to tailor to a certain wedding aesthetic as tablecloths and flowers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been fat all my life, and so has my wife. We were fat kids, fat teenagers, and we\u2019ve been fat adults all throughout our relationship \u2013 including a year-long stretch in our early 20\u2019s where, too ignorant to apply for foodstamps but too poor to stock our own cupboards, we ate just one meal a day. Not being fat has never been a legitimate option for us, no matter how many beach or theme park miles we regularly traverse together. And I\u2019m happy with that.<\/p>\n

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[Description: A white nonbinary person with a mohawk, swimming in the ocean with a boogie board, turning to look for a wave.]<\/figcaption><\/figure>But for the longest time, I tried to limit myself to a certain degree<\/em> of fatness. If I kept my fat \u201creasonable,\u201d then I could consider myself \u201cacceptable.\u201d I never bought into the \u201cgood fatty who regularly works out and eats salads for lunch\u201d model \u2013 I love treadmills and swimming, but literally everything else can fuck off, and the idea of lettuce<\/em> as food<\/em> can doubly fuck off<\/em> \u2013 but I did<\/em> find myself looking at my reflection and gauging what I thought was, or would<\/em> be, \u201ctoo fat\u201d for me<\/em>. An invisible line in the sand where I\u2019d go from being fat because I\u2019m fat<\/em>, and being fat because I\u2019m a fatty<\/em>. This fear was my fucked up way of both embracing the body positivity I\u2019d been preaching for years while also<\/em> holding onto the self-hatred instilled in me by our fatphobic culture.<\/p>\n

More than a double chin. Arm fat that partially or fully sagged over elbows. Not having distinguishable ankles. More than a single stomach roll. A stomach that protruded farther than my breasts and obscured the view of my pubic mound. These were my<\/em> \u201cunacceptable\u201d body markers, the dimensions of my line in the sand. I never found them \u201ctoo fat\u201d on other<\/em> people, but I still feared the possibility of my own<\/em> body changing to these proportions. I had learned to accept fat bodies except for mine<\/em>. I was only allowed a degree<\/em> of fatness.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s safe to say that most fat people \u2013 especially fat women and DFAB folks \u2013 have, at one time or another, maintained a secret list of things they think \u201cmake it okay\u201d for them to be fat, like the aforementioned \u201cgood fatty\u201d who works out and regularly eats rabbit food. These bizarre and logic-faulty bullet lists include food choices, behaviors, and body shapes that we individually think are \u201cacceptable\u201d to have\/do\/be, and serve as flimsy and usually ineffective shields for when we encounter fatphobia. We think things like \u2018I shouldn\u2019t let that insult get to me because I didn\u2019t overindulge with desert today, I\u2019m funny and likeable, and I can see my feet when I look down!\u2019 The criteria is all entirely irrational and founded on internalized fatphobia, and even if we do<\/em> meet all of these self-imposed standards, it doesn\u2019t actually protect us. Only having two chins and being physically active hasn\u2019t shielded me from feeling like dirt every time someone\u2019s called me a fat bitch from their rolled-down car window or when I flip through a dozen comics and the only body like mine is the bad guy or the incompetent best friend.<\/p>\n

But the irrationality didn\u2019t stop me from clinging to my lists over the years, holding my double chin high and pretending that I could both aggressively reject society\u2019s hatred of fat bodies and<\/em> court my own self-hatred like it was more reasonable. Whenever my wife admitted to hating parts of themself I\u2019d be confused and outraged, pointing out how beautiful they were and how they shouldn\u2019t let others\u2019 fatphobia dictate how they felt about themself, all the while still considering my own<\/em> self-hate \u2013 often about the same thing<\/em> they were unhappy with \u2013 perfectly reasonable. It couldn\u2019t possibly be fatphobia if it only pertained to me<\/em>, right?<\/p>\n

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[Description: A gif of Big Boo from Orange is the New Black<\/em> laughing sarcastically and then bitterly mumbling “fucking asshole” under her breath. Source<\/a>.]<\/figcaption><\/figure>There\u2019s no such thing as \u201cacceptable fat\u201d \u2013 emphasis on the air quotes. There is only accepting<\/em> fat, especially your own body\u2019s. Accepting your body even if cousins, movies, magazines, and predatory 40 million dollar businesses like Weight Watchers who thrive<\/em> on women\u2019s insecurities, tell you that you shouldn\u2019t. Accepting your body even if it changes<\/em>, or even if the things you do with it change. Accepting the same body that \u2013 if it belonged to someone else \u2013 you\u2019d defend against cat calls and internet trolls and gross fatphobic media.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to say that I left my lists behind because I grew wise, or because I was struck one day by a self-love epiphany. But while either of those would make for a more inspiring ramble, the blunt truth is I just got older and fatter.<\/p>\n

Depression and happiness both share a clever trick: they can make you stop looking at yourself. For some people, depression manifests in constant self-criticisms; for me, it often removes my attachment to my own humanity, and thus, to my body. Likewise, happiness \u2013 for me \u2013 burns bright and distracts from smaller, colder things like self-hatred, and all of the physical self that hatred fixates on. In the past five years, I\u2019ve had mostly the former but some of the latter, too, and \u2013 often without my active notice \u2013 my body has changed.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember when my ankles became less pronounced. I don\u2019t remember when my stomach started curving out farther than my (admittedly small anyway) boobs, or when I stopped being able to look down and immediately see my crotch instead of my stomach roll. I don\u2019t remember when my arm fat started peeking out over my elbows, or when the weird fat roll that\u2019s always been under my breasts started getting big enough to be seen through t-shirts. I don\u2019t remember if maybe I remembered before and I just don\u2019t remember now.<\/p>\n

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A picture of two white nonbinary folks in black dresses, holding hands as they walk along two joining train tracks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And I don\u2019t know how my body will change further as I approach 30.<\/p>\n

But I do know, and do remember, that when I first looked at my wife and I\u2019s engagement photos last December, I saw for the first time visual evidence that my<\/em> elbows were now those<\/em> elbows: the kind of \u201cunacceptable\u201d elbows I\u2019d feared all my life, with a little roll of fat encroaching on the bend of my arm.<\/p>\n

And while the visual surprised<\/em> me, because I haven\u2019t had a picture feature that part of my body from that angle since I was a child, it didn\u2019t bother me like I might have expected it to. I didn\u2019t immediately feel like I\u2019d crossed the uncrossable line I\u2019d drawn in the sand. Instead, it felt like I\u2019d finally given the sand a good kick and scattered the last lingering concept of unacceptable fat<\/em> into the wind. And the kick wasn\u2019t even an intentional one \u2013 rather, it was probably an idle sweep of my foot, maybe a step I\u2019d taken while walking across the beach to meet my wife at the water\u2019s edge. It likely just breezed away while I enjoyed the chill of bubbled surf swirling around my fat, indistinct ankles.<\/p>\n

My mom\u2019s second marriage was a short and unhappy one, so that wedding and its ill-fitting wedding dress bring back sour memories for a number of reasons. But it\u2019s my mother\u2019s frantic, angry mumble of \u201cI\u2019ve got to get out of this fucking thing\u201d the second we got back to her mother-in-law\u2019s house that sticks out the most in my mind, because I realized that even during the ceremony itself she was fixated on how her butt looked in the dress and how she\u2019d failed to meet her own body expectations. Expectations founded on hatred for fat bodies instilled in her by our culture. She wanted to escape her image and her expectations as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n

And \u201cescape\u201d shouldn\u2019t be one\u2019s dominant thought while getting married. It shouldn\u2019t be what you\u2019re thinking about beforehand, either, no matter what gossiping cousins, lovably clueless rom-com heroines, and garish wedding magazine covers tell you. We all know wanting to bolt from your fiance is an unquestionably bad sign \u2013 why is wanting to run away from yourself, or even just thirty pounds of yourself, considered so much more reasonable? Both are an indication that some part of this equation is off. If a woman is frantic and unhappy with an impending marriage to someone, it\u2019s probably because she doesn\u2019t love<\/em> her betrothed. Cousins, magazines, and especially romantic comedies, understand that<\/em> plotline. But if a woman is frantic and unhappy with her weight and spends the months or weeks before her wedding skipping lunch, living on a stairmaster, and pinching her arm fat while crying over a calendar, cousins and magazines and rom-coms \u2013 and fucking Weight Watchers \u2013 only claim<\/em> they understand it.<\/p>\n

I was fat when I got married. I was fat before I got married, I\u2019m fat as I write this post, and I\u2019ll be fat for my second, tenth, twenty-fifth, and fiftieth wedding anniversaries. I\u2019m fat when I eat healthy meals and I\u2019m fat when I eat a second slice of pie; I\u2019m fat when I spend Saturday with a laptop perched on my big belly to binge-watch Elementary and I\u2019m fat when I walk ten miles around a theme park just cus; I\u2019m fat when I\u2019m a lazy and I\u2019m fat when I\u2019m productive; I\u2019m fat no matter how many rolls, chins, or ankles I have or don\u2019t have. I\u2019m fucking fat!<\/p>\n

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Two figures in black dresses walking towards a sunrise over the ocean.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And I got married in a dress that accentuated the tuft of fat that protrudes beside my armpits, with my big thighs on pale display and my bare arms showing that dreaded flab over my elbows, and yet escape \u2013 and the ridiculous \u201cacceptable fat\u201d list that would have justified wanting to escape \u2013 was the last damn thing on my mind. Because I was getting married to the most amazing person in this truly awful world, and through sheer apathy I\u2019d let go of all the hateful strings that had held my mother back. Strings that had held me<\/em> back. Strings that can still<\/em> sometimes hold me back, when I let them. I work every day not to let them.<\/p>\n

And I have never been happier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month, Buster and I are celebrating our first wedding anniversary. We’ve been together over ten years, but queers have only been able to get married ‘round these parts since mid-2015 and we were too poor to hop right to it when the Supreme Court […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[854,724,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fat-body-positive","category-essays-articles","category-essays-guides"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t