>>78709
Going back to the original post, I am having my own marital crisis here. I forget what exactly was the pretext, by wife decided to get into her own weight loss journey with me, and it was horrible.
I knew she had lost weight, just not how much. And it's funny how knowing the exact number makes such a huge difference. Maybe I was deluding myself, but I thought she had lost maybe 40-50 lbs at most. Turns out she has lost 90 lbs, starting at 385. (As an aside, I never knew she was that big - I thought she maxed out around 375 and wondered if I was being optimistic at that, but we never talked about her exact weight because I did not want to have the ensuing conversation about her being so big she wanted to lose weight.) And she does not intend to stop losing.
First off, I am shocked that she lost nearly 25% of her size within 10 months of starting on tirzepatide. I thought people lost maybe 10-15% of their starting weight, though since read it was up to 20%, but it took more like 14-17 months to do that. And that then they plateau. But this is one of the things that I know about my wife and is sometimes good, sometimes bad, but when she puts her mind to something, she goes full bore into it and nothing will stop her. And she evidently has been taking that approach here.
I get the need to be healthy, and her numbers - blood glucose and something else were concerning - have reached really good level. And she has been exercising more and dealt with her balance problem. But even though she is now healthy, she still wants to keep upping her dose and losing more weight.
So we got into this, and one of her beefs was that she was unable to celebrate her victories with me. I told her that not talking about it was meeting her halfway (obviously this is the Cliff notes of our conversation - there was a lot more going on) and she thought that was still strange.
One of the biggest challenges I feel we have in discussing this is that she is not very good at seeing things from another perspective. She feels that if I love her, then this should not matter. And from her perspective as a woman - who do not care as much for the physical attraction side as men do - I get that. But I also feel that I have to be honest and tell her that her losing so much weight hurts me to my core, even though I love her and her being alive is more important than my "fetish" (which she calls it, and in some ways it is, but I think she packs a lot of negativity into that and I resent her using it that way), so I cannot celebrate her achievements in the way she wants. I didn't think about this until afterwards, but honestly her wanting me to celebrate this is akin to me asking her to mourn the loss of what I find most physically attractive in her. I would not expect that of her - though I wish she would at least recognize how I feel - and so that is why us not talking about it to me is a good middle ground.
Knowing how much she lost and that it is not over really hit me hard. I guess I had been in denial about how much she had lost, and honestly, it surprised me that she was still so big after losing so much weight. And I would have been ok if she never told me this and she plateaued where she is. Would I still miss her being as big as she was? Yes. Do I still wish that she had hit 500 lbs and stayed there, even if it meant we had less time to spend together and she had mobility issues? Tough, but if you were to ask me what I felt in my heart of hearts, I would have to answer yes. (And I would have been ok us both getting really fat and happy, even if that shortened my life, but that is another story. Bottom line is that I value quality over quantity, even though in this case it is the volume of our bodies that I characterize as "quality" of our lives (and quantity would be the length of our lives).)
So now, thanks to her need for us to talk about things to "celebrate" her achievements (instead of letting sleeping dogs lie), I feel like shit. I don't want to end our marriage - and I think that she doesn't either, though she was super upset about my reaction to her news - but for the first time since we got together have I felt that I wish we never had. This also stems from a hidden hatred of being fat that she had never mentioned before.
I understand the source of it - after being together for over 30 years, she had never told me about some of the stories of when she was young and how she was treated and how she felt it had affected her at work - but she has never talked about it before, and quite honestly if she had opened up earlier on in our relationship, then I can guarantee you we would never have gotten married. The relationship I had with the woman I was with before her was that way, and I eventually realized that I could not be with a woman, no matter how much I loved her and found her attractive, who did not love herself as a fat woman. I don't think my wife was deliberately trying to deceive me by any means, but I had always thought she was ok with her size. (Not that I ever thought she loved it - and I knew she hated getting any fatter, cause sometimes she would say if she saw the pics of some of the 600+ lb women that I liked that she would slit her wrists before she let herself get that big, which always bothered me, both because I thought it horrible to be so mean about being that fat as well as how insulting it was to me and my preference - but she never let on how much she disliked her size and how traumatized she was by it.) And it's not like I figured she would keep on growing - I always had a love-hate relationship with her getting over 400 lbs, insofar as I would have been so turned on if she had done so, but I also knew that seeing that number would have got her on a weightloss journey (I figured though it would have been WLS, as the horrors that those accursed GLPs have wrought were not even an inkling in my mind, and I also hoped her fear of something going wrong with WLS, as so often it does, would overwhelm her desire to get WLS as long as she stayed under 400.) But I never had any idea how much she disliked being fat and wanted not to be. That would have been the dealbreaker early on, and if I am being honest, were it not for the kids (who are old enough to be on their own at this point, but who I fear would side with her if we divorced) - and if I am being brutally honest, the fact that she makes nearly 2.5 times what I do now (situation used to be reversed but I hit a rough patch in my career and am making less than half what I used to while she has thrived and is making big $$). I am not sure it will not become a relationship breaker now.
Unfortunately, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube or un-ring the bell, and she told me what she did and cannot unsay it. If she respects my desire not to talk about this anymore and plateaus, I think we can make our way out of this. But if she keeps on wanting to talk things out and starts looking like a deflated water balloon (she looks a bit deflated now, but not too bad), then I don't know where things will end up. I already feel so conflicted and shaken to my core, but I still love her and cannot imagine not growing old together. But I also think maybe I still am thinking of the "old" her, by which I mean someone who was ok with who she was and did not hate herself as much as I now know she did. Someone who I would have wanted to start all over again with if I could magically go back 32 years, before I met her. But that conversation she forced did so much more than bother me about her losing weight (which I always knew would eventually happen, as I know you cannot be nearly 400 lbs without any health issues as you get older, which we are, and I would probably not be so upset if she was trying to lose more weight because she needed to for medical issues, though that is no longer the case). It shook me to my core that we had been living a lie about her being ok with her size when all along, she had been like the woman whom she knew I broke up with for self-loathing (to be fair, though, she was much more open about that - best example of that was that my previous gf had very fat legs, which I loved, and refused to wear shorts because she did not like people seeing her cellulite, but then wore leggings that did nothing to hide the cellulite, lol) and who sadly, I now think I would never have gotten together with had I known what she was thinking as I would like to have found a woman who loved being fat, or at least who genuinely was comfortable enough with herself that she did not mind it. That said, I did get two amazing sons who I love to bits and I cannot imagine a world without them, so there is that.
Pardon me for rambling so much, but I wanted to offload about this and this was the only place I could think to do it where I would not be judged for my lust for fat women, and where I know there are others suffering through similar troubles.