Q: My weight fluctuates and it’s been up over the past 18 months. Recently, my husband said he doesn’t want to have sex with me, and asked what I plan to do about my weight, and when. He said the past year has been very tough and wonders how I could do this, knowing the negative effect it’d have on “us.”
I’ve repeatedly told him his comments make it worse. I feel more demoralized, hopeless, also angry and trapped, and may even sneak food.
I feel he’s always watching what I eat and judging me.
We were madly in love initially. He often worries (aloud) that I’ll end up like my alcoholic mother who rejects anyone who criticizes her drinking. She’s divorced and reclusive. He thinks I want to reject anyone who won’t let me eat what I want.
I just want to be in control of my own life and my own body.
I’m the breadwinner and do a lot of home maintenance and child management because he travels for work (a month at a time or more). It’s hard to make my food and exercise the priority.
I don’t want to break up our family over this, but feel I need to get away from him to get healthy and happy.
Tough Love Project
A: His criticism — hounding you and blaming your weight for the state of your relationship — is a form of bullying.
Since you carry great responsibility in this union, recognize your strength instead of letting him whip you emotionally. Insist that he back off. Tell him you’ll then be fully capable of managing your weight on your own.
Also, suggest marital counselling together about the power struggle that appears to be going on. If he feels his constant “weight watch” is the only way he’s in charge, there are other things you two should change.
Or you’ll have to consider leaving him — not in the way your mother’s marriage ended but because he’s driving you away.
Feedback: There was a gap in my advice on May 15 to a husband whose wife had an affair with a co-worker/subordinate. I present a reader’s reaction here, followed by more information I should have added originally.
From the reader: You appeared to support the husband’s demand that his wife dismiss this ex-lover. How would this play out before a human-rights tribunal or employment-equity commission when a manager dismisses a subordinate with whom she was involved romantically, to repair her marriage, when she’s identified him as someone that’d be hard to replace?
My response: I appreciate your view. I should have addressed it myself, by advising that the wife talk to her former lover, a subordinate, and suggest she help him get placed in an equal position elsewhere if he’d accept such a move.
If he wouldn’t accept another position, and instead might launch a wrongful dismissal lawsuit or a human rights tribunal complaint, I agree that she’d be judged in the wrong for dismissing him.
From the husband’s point of view, the wife had to end all contact with this man if he was to fully trust that the affair was over. If that would be the only way to salvage the marriage and the former lover wouldn’t make a move, she should quit her job and find new work. If it is her own business, she must operate at a distance from her ex-lover.
TIP OF THE DAY
Bullying a partner about weight often perpetuates an unhealthy dynamic between them.
Email ellie@thestar.ca . Ellie chats at noon Wednesdays at thestar.com/elliechat . Follow @ellieadvice.
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