With my previous marriage experience i can understand, jtgain. My ex wife was one of the unfortuanate people who changed completely after the marriage, finding every excuse not to work, doing nothing around the house, and gaining 100lbs in a year. Her excuse was that “what she wanted out of a marriage had changed”.
I can honestly say i could understand your situation, and why you might have cheated, though i manged to wait until a divorce finalized. I would also venture to guess that there’s more going on than you might have noticed, likely some small niggling things that got under your skin while you were not paying attention.
I myself have a difficult time being attracted to overweight women. Cheating was a stupid thing to do though. You have a kid to think about too, how old is she? If she were to lose weight, would you then be attracted to her? Is the woman you cheated with aware you’re married? If so, I know a lot of women that never gave me a second thought until I started dating someone. What’s your relationship with her?
There’s a reason they call it ‘cheating’.
What a wretched situation for your daughter to be stuck in. She’s the only one without a choice here, but will probably be the one who is most affected. She has a mom who gained a large amount of weight for unknown reasons (medical? mental?) and a dad who cheated on her mom and then blamed her mom! What a lovely example for your daughter when she is old enough to look for a mate.
Your wife will never be able to lose that weight for you. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if she actually gained weight from the stress and pressure of the situation.
Personally, I think your wife needs to drop a couple hundred pounds of ass and move with her life.
I’m going to stick up a bit for the OP here, with the caveat that no, he shouldn’t have cheated, but also fine tuning that issue a bit…
One, his feelings and reaction to his wife’s very significant weight gain is perfectly reasonable and understandable. He feels betrayed because the person he married has moved the goal posts in a significant way, forcing him to adjust to something he is simply not comfortable adjusting to.
What if a spouse stopped showering several years into the marriage?
Or otherwise refused to attend to their basic grooming and hygeine?
Or decided they preferred to change from an active person to a couch potato?
Or started drinking heavily or using drugs?
Or GAINED 150 POUNDS?
In any relationship, it is fair to expect one another to make an effort to maintain the relationship, and that includes maintaining THEMSELVES.
Two, sex is a very important thing…can that be admitted and not just brushed to the side as trivial? The withholding of sex or otherwise using it as a weapon is a form of mental cruelty in a relationship. Gaining a large amount of weight or any other drastic change in personal upkeep and attractiveness CAN be a form of passive-aggressive punishment/retaliation which serves to effectively withold satisfying sex from the partner.
Forget being P.C., many people simply are not attracted sexually to obesity. They can no more change that than someone who IS can force themselves to be attracted to Kate Moss.
NO, he should not have sought out sex elsewhere, but to treat his act as inexcusable and simply selfish is, I feel, denying how important sex IS to most people. It is one of our most basic drives and needs, not some trivial whim.
I also suspect there are more serious underlying issues behind why she gained so much and why he cheated and why this issue wasn’t resolved long ago before it got to this point.
But I feel it is fair for him to say, look, not only do I love you and care about your health and am concerned that you have gained so much, but I find myself losing my sexual attraction to you and I want to get that back, again, because I LOVE YOU and want to make this work.
Yes, get counseling, make sure there is no underlying health issue, like clinical depression or thyroid/hormone problems. But I don’t think it’s at all “fair”, vows or not, to expect someone to just “deal with it” and resign themselves to a dismal sex life “until death do us part”.
Dan Savage had a column a while back on this issue, and while there are a few differences with the OP’s situation (mainly the length of the relationship and it not involving marriage) I think he had some good remarks for the writer:
“… Male or female, gay or straight, letting yourself suddenly and prematurely go to pot demonstrates a hostile disregard for your partner’s feelings. It also shows that a person takes his or her partner for granted, and nothing murders attraction with more dispatch than feeling taken for granted…”
BTW, I am a woman who, over the course of my 23 yr relationship with my late husband went through some significant weight gains surrounding the birth of our two children. Never gained anywhere close to 150 lbs, but 50 or so, yeah, TWICE. And I lost it in due time, not only because I prefered to look and feel like myself but also because I cared about HIM and our sex life/mutual attraction. He never once made a remark about my weight or rejected me because of it, but of COURSE he prefered me at my “normal” weight and not 200 lbs.
My wife gained about 40 pounds in the two years from when we got engaged to when we separated. Didn’t phase me in the least since she was happy. HOWEVER, had she gained 150 pounds (at 5’2"), I would have been pretty darned unhappy about it and it would have led to conflict and probably (if we hadn’t headed there for other reasons) divorce.
Please people, stop insulting our collective intelligence with this bullshit about how people get married for fatter or thinner and how you have to live with it and be happy. This flies in the face of Human Nature and you should damned well know better.
The way I’m reading it is most people collectively don’t agree with the way he handled it.
By the way, when I gained about 45 pounds in five years, that meant going from a size 2 or 4 in pants to a size 14. (I have got to start running again.) That means 45 pounds put me almost out of some whole brands. I cannot imagine where 150 extra takes you, but I’m imagining you’re in the Tents and Tablecloths aisle. I don’t mean to go on and on about it, but it’s kind of mind-boggling to me.
My wife and I gained weight in our 20+ years of marriage, yet we never looked elsewhere for sex. We are both considered obese by society, yet I still see the same woman I married all of those years ago.
Granted, there are some positions we no longer try, but we still explore other options to keep our sex life alive.
Some people seems to think that if a woman isn’t a walking skeleton, she’s not sexually attractive. I’m not attracted to obese women, just my wife.
The OP used the wrong head when he cheated on his wife and now must face the consequences of his actions. Telling his wife that she’s no longer sexually attractive has probably done a number on her self-esteem and self-confidence.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t agree to a divorce, lost the weight and leaves his sorry butt in the dirt.
Selection bias. Most people * who care to comment* don’t agree.
I have been faithful, but I’d be lying if I said I’d never been unhappy in a relationship and considered infidelity as a way to receive a little emotional validation.
To those that think he’s scum for cheating, consider yourself lucky you’ve never been in his shoes. It’s not as cut-n-dried as you’d think.
But would you have just cheated on your wife, blaming her obesity, or would you have tried to work things out with your wife? I agree that a 150 weight gain is pretty damned big, and some people will care about it more than others, but the OP seemed to be treating it like it meant that the wedding vows were off (unilaterally, at his discretion). Some things ARE deal-breakers, like drug abuse or alcoholism or abuse of any kind; for some people, weight gain could be in that list, too, but you don’t respond like the OP did. If the OP had cheated because of abuse, I don’t think we’d be letting him off the hook for that, either - I think most of us feel that you need to get out of one boat before you get into another (even if, or especially if, that boat is sinking).
I could tell you some personal stories that show just how much restraint one can have over his/her desire to cheat. That said, I don’t personally think he’s scum.
I would need to know more about the situation to see where he’s coming from. Did he talk to his wife about her weight and how he wasn’t attracted to her?
You know it really doesn’t matter what weight the wife was, is, wishes to be or why she gained weight at all. The OP has had the opportunity and the option to encourage her to seek medical advice for seven years. He’s had the opportunity and option to encourage her to change her/their lifestyle for seven years. He’s had the opportunity and option to end the marrage for seven years. And any and all of these options should have been the ones he pursued before he decided to go stick it in some other woman.
All these suggestions to fix the marriage by “fixing” the wife, i.e. make her thinner, miss the mark. The OP didn’t just lose sexual attraction to his wife, he lost all respect for her. And if she has a gastric bypass tomorrow and loses in one year what she gained in the last seven, it won’t give her back the respect of her husband. That’s been destroyed, by his hand.
He always had the choice. He made the wrong one.
And frankly, I really don’t care if he wants to “save” his marriage. If I had a chance to talk to her I’d say it directly to her face: DTMFA. Get out. There’s nothing left for you here.
Is it possible you can keep the positive aspects - the companionship, the joint child raising, the love for each other - and have a more open sexual side to the marriage? It doesn’t work for many, but it does for some.
Admittedly, you’ve made that very unlikely by being dishonest about it.
The cheating was wrong. Losing the attraction, though. . .well, it’d be nice if we were all altruistically wired, but that isn’t how it goes. That being said, I’d really look at all the problems, and all the options.
Note–I’m speaking as someone who was in a marriage, and who gained a large amount of weight within the marriage. That marriage had problems besides the weight, but I’m just going to address that here.
I was aware that this was a problem; we both had horrible eating habits, and we both gained weight. I just gained more than him–the curse of being female, I guess. But when I would try to lose weight, I’d be met with complaints about how it made going out a bitch. If I cooked, I’d get complaints about how he didn’t like what I made (for instance, vegetables that weren’t canned). It was basically very, very clear to me that whatever I did, I’d be doing on my own. No support. No help. As you can imagine, this didn’t really help.
Losing that amount of weight’s going to be a lifestyle change, and you’re going to have to make it together. She may need a doctor’s help. She may need a therapist if the weight gain is due to depression or some other similar condition. She’s going to need your support, and, frankly, that support can’t be conditional.
You need to look deep within yourself to see whether or not you can provide that support. If you can’t, then you need to be honest with her and with yourself. But, poor decisions aside, you seem to love her. It may very well be worth your while to work on this together–but that’s going to take committment on both sides.
Good luck to both of you.
Obviously he was wrong to cheat - he knows that. People talking about her weight are mostly saying that it obviously isn’t just the weight - for one thing, you don’t gain that much weight that fast if there’s nothing else going on. For another thing, I seriously doubt he cheated just because of the weight. Generally speaking there’s more going on behind the scenes in a marriage than just “she got fat so I slept around”.
This. Sociopathic folks aside, lots of people end up cheating because they don’t end up fulfilled in their relationships. Lots of normal, ordinary, people. You don’t spontaneously end up cheating. You drift apart, get distant, forget to be a team, whatever. But the need to be wanted is every bit as valid as the need to be wanted regardless of body image.
There’s two people at fault here. He’s LESS guilty than the court of public opinion is giving him here and she’s MORE guilty. There’s two people here and neither are completely innocent of the outcomes.
I’m not saying it’s OK. What I’m saying is that he fell off the wagon, so to speak. He failed. But there’s a difference between a husband that goes out and spends all the family’s money at the bar all night, and the alcoholic that goes to treatment, stays sober, fights the alcoholism, but then gets drunk one night. The OP is not the evil monster like the former alcoholic, but just the human, fallible person that the latter guy is.
What I don’t get is this:
Wait a minute…you’re saying that it’s better to divorce someone and have sex with other people, then to just have sex with other people? That makes no sense. Either way, the wife ends up hurt and the husband ends up in other people’s beds. At least if he just cheats, there’s a chance that they can recover the relationship. Sure, he’s failing to be a good husband, but he hasn’t given up yet. You’re suggesting he just give up entirely and throw in the towel.
In other words, common sense tells you that divorcing someone is WORSE than cheating on them! Why in the world should he consider that his first recourse?!
Look, I realize your name is BigT, but you’ve got to realize something- 150 extra lbs on an already “big girl” is scarily fat. It’s gross. It’s repulsive. To put that in perspective, I haven’t gained 150 lbs since I was conceived! That’s almost a pound a month, every month, for 13 years. That’s an extra pound for every full moon that comes between your first day of kindergarten and your high school commencement!
Do you realize how much weight that is now?
Again, your logic appears to be that “honey, I’m leaving and not coming back” is better than “Honey, I left but I’m back now.” It makes no sense.
The fact that this is even an utterable statement shows that there is something very wrong with our society’s relationship with food. You call thin people “walking skeletons” and see nothing wrong with getting so fat that you can’t even move normally.
I disagree. Personally, if there were a problem in my marriage that my husband didn’t admit to, even if I “sensed” a problem to the point where the marriage was rocky, and he cheated rather than talking to me about it, and only admitted that it was a problem once the infidelity came to light, I’d consider that to be a betrayal similar in magnitude to cheating. Also, the marriage would be over, because I’d never feel like I could trust him to deal with problems like an adult. From the way the OP sounds, his needs weren’t being met, he never really talked about it, then he stepped out and we’re supposed to be sympathetic to his plight? Something’s wrong with his marriage down to the core, and they need to get themselves into counseling yesterday if they want to have a hope of fixing it.
**Amicable Divorce. **
All other options suck.
Seriously, I saw my ex-best friend recently at a library thing (the girl who practically lived in my house for years and then started dating somebody who told her to cut me off because he didn’t think I was a good influence… so she did!) and she’d gotten so grossly fat I couldn’t even feel good about it. She’d been a bit bigger always, yeah, but now she was huge. With that greasy hair some people have when they stop taking care of themselves. And trust me, if it was bad enough that I didn’t have the heart to celebrate this girl getting fat, it was bad.
I promise you, she didn’t gain anywhere near 150 pounds. Maybe 100? Maybe not even 100 - she’s short.
ETA - my point is, there was a point where she’d gained 50 pounds, and then a point where she gained 100 pounds, and nobody dealt with the problems. The weight is a symptom, an outward sign of the massive problems in that relationship IMHO.