A few weeks ago I wrote about the boundaries we maintain around disclosing care work to the people in our lives. I found this post on Tetris conversations interesting — where you get so lost in cliches and logistics that you fail to connect.
The other day I was spending time with people (in person! following guidelines!) and one of the guys was waxing poetic about a fat baby. Speaking lovingly and adoringly of elbow rolls. Rolls for days.
We all love a fat baby. I’m not the only one who’s filled their social media feeds with various round, thicc, and chonky animals. But we’re bombarded with messaging teaching us that (non-baby) people are supposed to look a very specific way, like we’re all purebred dogs being groomed to breed standard.
French bulldogs are c h o n k at breed standard.
Sometimes I try to imagine what it was like before magazines full of photographs became common in the 1920s. Before that, the people you saw were almost exclusively the weird and wonky actual people in your lives.
As much as it seems strange to me that people today are so actively sculpting their bodies, I love how the buff people I see in life look nothing like the people in ads. They’re buff, but they’re still weird and wonky.
“World class” models, like athletes, are outliers. They’re a certain type of anomaly, not something to aspire to any more than you can aspire to have any particular set of genetic mutations.
Today, 2 out of 3 Americans is considered overweight, 1 in 4 has a disability, 1 in 5 has a chronic illness, and 1 in 7 is over 65.
Yet somehow, to be attracted to someone who is overweight, disabled, chronically ill, or old is seen as so bizarre that it’s considered a fetish.
It’s no wonder then, that so many of us have had the experience of a partner saying they can’t imagine that we’d find them attractive anymore. Or can’t imagine anyone finding them attractive in the first place.
There are a lot of disabled people having sex with each other and with “abled” people.
People who deal with physical limitations know better than anyone that the physical act of sex can be a lot of different things. But really, the world would be better off if we all knew that.
I love #disabledandcute on Instagram. I’m in awe of the way Trista Marie, Keah Brown, Alex Dacy, Ericka Hart, Soph Butler, Andrew Gurza, and others share their lives (and thirst traps) with us.
In a time when so much of my social life is happening online, it’s wonderful to have the chance to connect with people who are out there being their vulnerable, quirky selves.
It scares me a little that being attracted to someone and loving someone would ever be a revolutionary act. But it is.
And it’ll get you shadowbanned.
I can’t help but imagine it was a very different experience to pursue romance when it was normal to have scarring from smallpox and deformities from rickets and there was no mass media to tell you that your physical quirks made you unworthy of love.
As much as we may, as a culture, hold up a certain look as the ideal — or as normal — few of us meet that standard. And somehow the vast majority of us are attracted to the weird and wonky people in our lives.
People with serious disabilities are less likely to be legally married. This is at least party because doing so often disqualifies them from any government support they may be getting. That doesn’t mean they don’t have sex or fall in love.
If it was true that people weren’t attracted to “unattractive” people, there would be a lot less messaging about it to convince us of this “fact.” There would be no need to create financial (and administrative and labor) penalties for marrying someone with a disability. It wouldn’t have been illegal to marry someone with a disability if no one wanted to.
Fat phobia is so rampant in Western medicine that even I, as someone who is a “healthy” weight, have experienced it.
I can think of so many people I know who have had their symptoms ignored and were denied testing and treatment for serious conditions because they were told they just needed to lose weight.
Being fat can be a death sentence not because of biology, but because so many doctors see it as a reason to not care about people.
It’s normal to feel differently towards a sexual partner when their body changes.
Our bodies are connected to how we experience the world. Bodies change with illness and trauma. Bodies change with effort and time. There is no bodily change without a change to your life and your relationship to your partner.
We choose a partner for a lot of reasons, not just looks. People are constantly changing and sometimes the partner we have is a very different person from the one we initially were drawn to.
What does it say about our society that it feels less taboo to say we’re not attracted to someone because their body has changed than to say they have become a different person and we don’t feel connected to them anymore?
Choosing to stay in a romantic partnership with someone who has become disabled is not an act of charity. A marriage based on obligation and charity isn’t a partnership.
I don’t ever want to be in a marriage that exists because of pity.
Being attracted to someone and loving them and wanting to be their caregiver are three different things.
You can be attracted to someone you don’t love.
You can love someone and not find them sexually attractive.
You can love someone and not want to be responsible for providing ADL support.
Knowing that someone deserves care is not the same as being obligated to meet all of their needs yourself.
I don’t understand what people mean when they say “I’m not a caregiver, I’m just a spouse.”
What are we promising when we form a romantic partnership?
Is love a promise to meet someone’s every emotional, financial, and physical need?
Does love mean always prioritizing someone else’s needs above our own?
Does love require being vulnerable enough to tell someone our needs and allow our partner to meet them?
Does unconditional love mean our love is given freely, without obligations and demands, or does it mean that once given it must continue eternally?
Is a marriage a partnership of equals or is it an unbreakable promise to continue supporting someone, no matter what?
There are no universal answers, we each form our own and they shape our lives.
If you’d like to share your answers to these questions, please hit the comment button below or post in our private Facebook group for people providing care for a (current or former) romantic partner.
We also just created a group for people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s providing care for a romantic partner.