Why I can’t wait to be a fat bride

A few weeks back I was sitting at a bar, holding hands with my fiance, when a woman recognised me from the internet (it happens, I swear!). She was a fan of my writing, so she came up to introduce herself, and we shambled through a few minutes of pleasant chit-chat. 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 my fiance, a musician. “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?”

Sigh.

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 wilful leaps past “couple” and landed on “roommates” in her split-second sussing-out of our relationship – it happens literally all the time. But it was a disheartening reminder of an assumption that has circumscribed my life: couples ought to “match”. My partner and I do not. He is thin and I am fat. He is conventionally desirable and I am a “before” picture in an ad for weight-loss tapeworm eggs. 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 startling number of people find it bewildering at best, enraging at worst.

There are long, manic messageboard threads devoted to comparing photos of me with photos of my fiance’s thin, conventionally pretty ex-wife, and dissecting what personality disorder could possibly have caused him to downgrade so egregiously (two conclusions are possible here: I have pissed off a lot of misogynists, and misogynists are the most bored people on the planet). I can’t tell you how many women hit on him right in front of me – and how many late-night Facebook messages he gets – as though they could just “have” him and he would say, “Oh, thank God you finally showed up,” 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 an aggressively entrenched paradigm that I’ve only recently managed to excise from my own psyche – me, the feminist killjoy shrew – so I really can’t begrudge anyone that initial reaction. But, every time, the subtext is clear: you are reaching above your station, fat lady.

And now we’re getting married. Now I’m not just a fat girlfriend – I’m a fat bride-to-be. (As though being a feminist bride wasn’t contradictory enough.) And, it turns out, that feels like a lot of responsibility.

When I was a kid, there weren’t any fat female characters on TV or in the movies who were in relationships like mine. The few fat women who were allowed on screen and afforded any scrap of sexual agency (which I’m pretty sure you can count on a big, one-fingered, Roseanne-shaped hand) all had, without fail, fat husbands. They matched. But most fat women in media didn’t even get that far – most were lovelorn, vulgar comic relief, their sexuality spun as either a menace or a joke. (To be honest, not much has changed.)

So, I grew up assuming that I would never get married (unless I found my own John Goodman – swoon), because marriage was for thin women, the kind of women who deserved to be collected. How could I be a bride when I was already what men most feared their wives would become? I was the mise en place for a midlife crisis. I was the Ghost of Adultery Future. At least, that’s what I’d been taught. And that’s why I can’t goddamn wait to be a fat bride.

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 programmes. 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 four even though I’m a size six.” And that’s totally fine, of course, if that’s your priority.

But 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. So I’ll be fat on my wedding day. Because being fat and happy and in love in public is still a radical act. Attention, every fat teenager on earth: you’re invited.