Dear Sister,

This is a real sensitive subject and I applaud your openness in bringing it to this forum.

I have been thinking about your question for some time now.

Here is something for you to consider. What makes you feel that the problem you have with dating is related to your size? I ask you to consider this because sometimes it helps to reexamine the “obvious”. Also, it seems that you may have a preset way of filtering your experience.

Let me explain. I remember seeing an experiment where people were divided into two groups. The first group was left alone. The second group was told that something would be done to their face to make them look unappealing. Make-up artists then took the second group and did their magic. No one in the second group was allowed to use a mirror or see what the make-up artists had done.

After stepping out into the world, the second group reported being treated poorly, getting less attention from the opposite sex, and that people would not even make eye contact with them.

Here’s the catch. The make-up artists did nothing. They only pretended to alter the appearance of the second group. The only thing that was different was the group’s perception of themselves! They were under the impression that they were unattractive.

Now look, I will not pretend that this society doesn’t have certain hang-ups with people who are larger than average. There are many people that do. But this isn’t about them. It’s about you. You can’t force people to change how they think. You CAN change how YOU think; and we’ve seen from the experiment above that how we think has a tremendous impact on our lives.

So back to the “problem”: do you believe that if you lost weight your dating life would then be perfect? If you truly believed that, I think that you would be sufficiently motivated to lose the weight. It’s a false choice however, and after losing the weight under that premise, you would probably find something else that was “wrong”.

I think if you told a hundred people that all they had to do to be in a “perfect” relationship was to climb Mount Everest, you’d have one hundred people climbing Mount Everest right now. But, alas, being in a great relationship has much more to do with who you are then what you do. We make our lives from the inside, out. Not the other way around.

Do you think you get some benefit from maintaining the size you are now? It was told to me, and I think it rings true that, what has us stuck sometimes is not what we don’t know…it’s what we don’t know we don’t know. It is the unconscious blind spot, the pain that we may have even hid from ourselves.

Deep down, do you think that being the size you are may be a way of shielding yourself from intimacy, a way to keep people at a distance?

I know I have given you a lot to think about. I encourage you to write back with your thoughts after you have had some time to reflect. This has the makings of an ongoing dialogue that I am confident will serve our growing audience.

Thank you for bringing your energy to this space.

I look forward to hearing from you.

This is only the beginning.

Love,

Truman