I heard someone say once that for compulsive overeaters, romance novels and romantic movies are a huge set up because it gives you the impression that despite all sorts of manufactured conflicts and drama, everyone ends up happy and in love and with the person that they are hopelessly in love with. The older and (hopefully) more mature I become, I am coming to believe that idea more and more. There have been few things that were a greater source of heart ache for me than the world of romantic relationships. Growing up as a morbidly obese young woman, my self image prevented me from entering into the world of teenage or young adult romantic relationships. My physical presence was such a deterrent that not only did I not do any practical footwork towards having a relationship, I just really and truly believed that my weight meant that I didn't even DESERVE to have someone find me attractive and want to date me. When I have expressed this thought, people have gotten on my case for being overly self deprecating. And I can understand where they're coming from. But to me, in my head and even more so, in my gut, it was just an ORGANICALLY TRUE thought. The sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and no man will love me because of my weight. I think part of that comes from the mantra learned at home, "I'll be happy when I'm thin...". But it was just something that I believed at the point when boys and girls went from cootie infested pains in the tush to something more around the junior high/high school age.
This line of thinking had two effects. One of them was that I did a great deal of vicarious living through the romantic relationships of my girl friends. Because I went to an all girls high school, I naturally had more female friends than male friends and so I had ample opportunity to hear about all of the sweet and romantic relationships that were blossoming as we grew into young adults. My closest friend at the time was also open and willing for me to meet her boyfriends and so I had several experiences of meeting guys and feeling involved and yet very much being "the third wheel". I could spend time with these boyfriends of friends because they were safe, and not available to me so I could relax a bit around them. I could have the "experience" of dating without the anxiety and fear of rejection that naturally comes with these types of things. Because I had such an overblown fear of rejection from boys/men and just felt like I would absolutely DIE of pain from the rejection if I actually put myself out there for anyone, vicariously living through my friends was safe.
The second effect that occurred was that I had what might diplomatically be called an overactive fantasy life. If I had a friendship with an unattached person I would immediately begin constructing our wedding and Pottery Barn perfect life in my head. I can't tell you how many times I've been married in my own mind. :) But it wasn't enough to fantasize about unattached people, they had to be someone who also had a rather significant flaw that made them unavailable to me, and therefore safe. I've had a long standing crush on a friend of mine who was a flamboyantly gay hair dresser. I had a completely obsessive crush on someone who made it quite clear to me that he preferred his girls to look like girls from your average rock and roll videos, (blonde, attractive and perhaps surgically enhanced in the cleavage area). It almost seemed like I wouldn't go obsessive about a guy unless he was totally unavailable to me. Reality as many have discovered, was often a bit more disappointing than the John Hugh's movie going through my mind.
I took a friend to Junior Prom who was in the beginning stages of a romance with his high school sweetheart and subsequently married a girl who was my best friend growing up. That was the only "boy-girl" dance I went to during high school save for going to sophomore homecoming that I went to with a friend from a Youth Group camp that I'd gone to the prior summer. While it's always good going to events with friends, I wasn't seasoned enough to not allow my head to go into some of the more typical crushes that are common in the minds of high school girls.
My senior year of high school I had what would come closest to being a high school romance. We were friends who were in the same youth group and we started talking as friends and began to spend a great deal of time together hanging out and also talking on the phone. I certainly liked him and would have loved him to be my boyfriend but neither of us were willing to express more than friendship feelings at the time. It was a good experience but again, reality was disappointing compared to what I wanted to happen. But at this point, I was in a position where I was just accepting that I was not going to have a boyfriend, and that I might NEVER have one. There are few things more depressing than being resigned to ANYTHING at the age of 17 years old.
I might as well have been in a nunnery during college. And in the immortal words of Forrest Gump, "that's all I have to say about that." It wasn't until I had been in OA for a little bit over a year that I had my first real stab at a relationship. For the uninitiated, there is a concept that when you pick up an addiction, you stop growing emotionally until you stop using your drug of choice. Since I'd been a compulsive overeater since I was 11 or 12 years old, although I was 25 years old physically, I felt like I was 13 or 14 years old emotionally. ON A GOOD DAY. At a retreat I started chatting with another young man who was also there and we struck up a friendship in the three short days of the event and it was the beginning of a very sweet experience for me. He lived in the Bay Area and I in Sacramento, so we talked a great deal on the phone. Since he was also in recovery it made talking a great deal easier. Being in recovery is sometimes like being in the military, there is a "lingo" and acronyms and it helps greatly if the person you're interested in has the decoder ring. I was asked to come share my story at his home meeting and so I went to speak and there was something freeing about him hearing all the blood and guts of my eating and food addiction past. It got a lot of anxiety right out of the way.
After talking on the phone and seeing each other in group settings there was an opportunity for us to have what was considered the first one-on-one date. The night before we were talking on the telephone late at night (You know when you're getting to know a potential romantic interest and you can talk on the phone for hours at a time and then you look up and it's 2am in the morning?) and he finally brought up the issue of what I like to endearingly call the, "I like-you-like you" conversation. He was sweetly honest in saying that he didn't just think of me as a friend and wanted to actually have a dating relationship. And while I was sort of thinking that's the direction we were headed, until it was said expressly, I wasn't about to put my neck on the chopping block and risk the dreaded rejection that I was always sure was just around the corner. I immediately became a completely vulnerable 13 year old in my mind and heart. It felt like I had been rubbed over head to toe in sandpaper. Even though he wasn't even in town yet, I felt very raw and exposed. We had several more dates and my heart, which I had been so viscously protecting since getting teased by the boys in my grade school class at St. Mel's, hurt and hurt bad. Even though this should have been one of the happiest times for me, I was anxious, upset and extremely emotional. I discovered during that experience that there was one thing I feared more that rejection. To me at the time, not being rejected was infinitely more scary than being turned down.
In the end, after about 6-8 weeks of dating, I stepped away for reasons that I'm not real clear about in retrospect. This man was not someone I was likely to end up spending the rest of my life with but at the stage I was at, that was hardly the goal. I needed practice in talking and LISTENING and learning how to have a romantic relationship. I regret stepping away as early as I did in the process, but I conducted myself with honesty and consideration which made the experience positive in the end. I was also struggling with a completely obsessive crush on what my friends and I called a "bad monkey". A guy who was attractive to me more because of what was wrong with him that who he was genuinely as a person. I think I chose the safety of a mental private obsession rather than the scary vulnerable reality of someone who was saying to me in express terms, "I like you just as you are RIGHT NOW". But I learned a lot through my fledgling dating experience. With the most important thing being that despite WHATEVER prevailing thoughts I might have about myself or body image, I was likable just as I was.
I've always thought that there's a rather large chasm between an idea being true in my mind and my heart. Nowhere is that more pronounced than when it comes to my own thoughts of being an attractive desirable woman. I have several friends of size who have vibrant and full dating lives, and one who is married to a really truly great guy. They don't let their size hinder them in any way, but specifically in the arena of romance. I truly envy their innate belief in themselves. And when I try to imagine myself thinking that way, it's easier to imagine myself walking on Mars in the next 6 months. Intellectually I SHOULD believe that I am more than the size of my body, that there is a man out there who will find me interesting and funny, attractive and worth being with. I also INTELLECTUALLY know that pressing the call button for an elevator 15 times after the button gets lit up doesn't make the elevator get there any faster. But I press the button anyway.
And so as I continue on this journey towards physical, emotional and spiritual health I know that I am going to have to change the way I view myself in the world of romance. Because I know (intellectually I suspect) that the only person keeping me out of the dating game is the one staring back at me in the bathroom mirror every morning when I'm brushing my teeth. I want to be in a place where I don't judge someone based solely on their appearance anymore than I would want to be judged. I want to be willing to set down the fantasy life and pick up a REAL life, and I want to be able to suit up and show up to this area of life truly feeling like one among many. NO better but NO worse. My experience of being in recovery has shown me that I am just as powerless over the way I think about romantic relationships as I am over the idea that food will fix my problems. And the good news is that the solution therefore, is the same. I admit I'm powerless over the issue and I ask a power greater than myself to change my heart, so that the chasm between my heart and mind can shrink. And sometimes that power greater than me is the support of friends, who truly know me well enough to call me on my faulty thinking. Sometimes that power is my therapist who lays out my thinking in a logical progression so I'm able to see that if I had a friend who thought about themselves the way I think about myself, I'd treat them with infinite kindness, love and affirmation. Once again, I've got a ways to travel on this issue, but I'm getting started on the journey.
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