Happy Monday, everyone. The sun is shining, half our country is underwater, the other half is up in flames, and I have once again lost the remaining vestiges of my hope in mankind. I mean that literally, BTW—I have no faith in men, as opposed to humans in general (although the rest of you aren’t too far off my list, so don’t get comfortable). My faith in the male population has been decimated faster than my group of six friends decimated four plates of nachos yesterday afternoon, thanks to a little ol’ Reddit post I found over the weekend entitled, “I [25M] don’t know how to convince my [24F] fiancé to lose weight. I no longer find her attractive”. Why do I do this to myself? I don’t fucking know. I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment.
Anyway, the text of this post has since been deleted, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this. This 25-year-old Reddit user wrote in because he’s since grown unattracted to his fiancée due to her weight gain. He writes, “Me and my Girlfriend were the typical ‘gym couple’. We worked out together, ate healthy, nutritious meals every day and would spur each other on to be as physically fit as possible. Fast forward to now and after having proposed to her, she’s been piling on the pounds and no longer wants to go to the gym or on runs.”
Like, okay, fair. If you bonded over a mutual activity and that was basically the foundation of your relationship and now one partner has completely lost all interest in that, yeah, I can see how that would be tough to deal with. Even if you do sound like the most annoying people in the universe. He continues, “I do love her personality but physically she disgusts me by her mannerisms whilst eating and she is becoming lazier by the day.”
NOPE. Nope. You lost me the moment you said your fiancée, the woman you’re about to pledge your loyalty to in sickness and in health, “physically disgusts you.” Also, what do you mean “by her mannerisms whilst eating”? Like, is she a loud chewer? Because I feel like that’s a pretty easy conversation to have. Or do you just mean her eating habits but you’re too afraid to say it? But you know what, okay, I can understand what this guy’s going through. Like, if you started dating a supermodel and now they’re morbidly obese, I can totally see how your attraction would wane. So is that what happened here? Did we go from two extremes of the weight spectrum? Um, no.
“She’s 5’5 and 160 lbs now and before I proposed, she was 132 and looked amazing.”
Okay, wait wait wait. I got out my handy dandy BMI calculator on the internet to see just how bad of a change we’re talking here. So to start, at 132 pounds and 5’5″ we’re talking a BMI of 22.0 That’s a normal BMI. Ok, all good here. But then I got to pluggin’. And at 5’5″, weighing 160 pounds puts you in a BMI of 26.6, which is the overweight category. Not obese—just overweight. And you know how much weight you’d have to lose to get back in a normal BMI range? 10 pounds. Yes, really. At that height, the normal BMI range ends at 150 pounds. So yeah. To be fair, a 28 pound weight gain in the span of a year is definitely concerning, but at the end of the day this guy is going to end his engagement over TEN FUCKING POUNDS.
Are you kidding me? Ten pounds? That’s how precariously your relationship hangs in the balance? WTF would happen if your fiancée got sick? Or got pregnant? Would you dump her the second she gave birth because her baby weight didn’t immediately melt off? You’re gonna sit here and propose to someone and yet you can’t even have a conversation with them to try and work through your issues before ending the engagement? Ok. This is the type of shit I point to when my dad asks why I’m still single.
And you know what the best worst part is? The comments that are just endorsing this fuckboy’s entitled attitude. There’s comments like, “She’s starting to develop a different lifestyle than you, you can totally say this is a dealbreaker and move on. I know break-ups suck, but at least this happened before the wedding. You’ll both be happier with someone who lives the same lifestyle.” Another one says, “If already at 24 she’s letting herself go like that… there’s very little hope that she’ll be interested in staying lean and in shape in middle adulthood.” Like, fuck all this bullshit. How much do you all want to bet that if a woman was posting this about her fiancé, the comments would be all, “Stick by him, don’t be a shallow bitch, do you even know what ‘for better or for worse’ means?” Or like, at best it would be like, “invite him to the gym with you, cook him healthy meals, encourage him” bullshit. And I’m not just taking crazy leaps of faith off my feminist soapbox here. I literally know this for a fact because I am secretly a Reddit lurker by night. A few—keyword, few—people rightfully pointed out that maybe something more is going on here to spark this weight gain, like depression or anxiety, and maybe this guy should try to get to the root of this sudden change before going for the nuclear option.
So, um, yeah. Fuck this guy and fuck all this bullshit. And to all you 25-year-olds who are out here getting engaged for the Insta, maybe you should really think through what it means to commit to someone for the rest of your life before you pop the question. It will save you a lot of time and money and it will save me a lot of hypertension. Kthx.
