Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (16 page)

“I’m Kelsey!” I called over the din. We were smushed into the crowded nook of an East Village cocktail bar.

“Gary!” He called back.

After that, I have no idea what we talked about. I was too distracted by the manic little cheerleader bouncing around my head, shrieking, “He’s cute! He’s talking to you! You’ve been chatting for more than five minutes ohmygodohmygod!” Naturally, I had to get out of there.

“I’m going to go!” I yelled, in what I hoped was a friendly way.

“Oh.”

“I mean, I’m just going to go get another drink!”

“Oh, okay!”

I never came back. Whoever he was, he was too cute for comfort.

The next morning, it clicked. While catching up over hangover bagels, I told Jon about meeting his friend Gary, and how I had totally talked to him for five whole minutes.

“Who? Do you mean
Harry
?”

“No no, Gary. The guy with glasses in the white button-down.”

“Yeah, that’s Harry. I don’t know a Gary. Who’s named Gary anymore?”

That’s when I finally figured out that Harry-not-Gary was the guy who messaged me on OkCupid months ago. And, that meant he thought I was cute, at least online. He’d talked to me for five minutes in real life, which meant he thought I was cute
and
not incredibly boring.

I sat staring agape at my bagel, putting the pieces together like a detective whose case just cracked wide open.

“He’s a really good guy,” Jon affirmed.

Given the evidence at hand, and the fact that I’d been the unresponsive jerk who’d ignored his message months ago, I decided to go ahead and add Harry as a Facebook friend. Next, I took it a step further, sending him a carefully crafted bashful message, saying something along the lines of, “Really nice talking to you the other night. PS: Sorry I ignored you.” And, because he was indeed a good, not-generic, not-icky guy, he responded by asking me out. We had our first date a few days later at a Japanese restaurant in the East Village. After a couple hours of talking I found myself so nervous and excited by his sweet, subtle humor that I pulled the old make-out trick. We kissed on First Avenue, then in a taxi, then at his apartment. When I finally pulled away and told him I had to go home, he smiled sadly.

“Really? Why?”

“I want to see you again, okay?”

“Well, good, because you’re gonna.”

He pulled me back in close and locked eyes with me. Not for a second did I want to look away.

Ending things with Jared wasn’t horrible, but it was sad. We both knew we could’ve been friends in other circumstances, but in the end, we just let go. Loose and intermittent as our fling was, it was still a connection and severing it hurt. But, even if there hadn’t been a Harry, I knew it was time for me to stop dating in limbo. I was finally ready for the real deal.

And the real deal was
great
. It was hand holding and long talks and then running home to text my friends about the hand holding and long talks. We catapulted into love, taking each other on little adventure dates and half-seriously planning weekend trips. In mere weeks I moved past the phase of will-he-text-me-back anxiety and into the ease of knowing that he would. Harry was a rock, right from the start. There was no hesitation and no games. I was almost disappointed to discover what a straight shooter he was. Having grown up in a post–
Sex and the City
world, I expected narcissism, manipulation, or at the very least, a debilitating mommy issue we’d have to work through in order to get to the good part. But Harry came as advertised: a good one.

If Harry was happy with things moving fast, then I just wanted to go faster. We were both so bonkers for each other, I figured why not? Bring on the milestones! We had our first date in June, and by August, I’d dropped the L word. I raised the question of boyfriend-girlfriend status, oh, four thousand times, and though he knew we weren’t there yet and wasn’t in a rush to be, Harry never balked. In these moments, his calmness was what brought me back to earth—if only for a moment. I remembered this wasn’t the kind of woman I was, and definitely not the kind I wanted to be. This was the behavior of a loopy teenager—not the independent adult I’d become over the last ten years, while my friends had paired off.

Still, if Harry brought out the giddy in me, he also brought out the frantic, high-speed maniac. The September night we finally became official, he leaned over in bed and mumbled in my ear:

“So, would you maybe wanna…”

“Say it!”

“…be my girlfriend?”

(Here again, I’ll remind you that your adult friends may not appreciate 3 a.m. texts, no matter how exciting your news is.)

Of course, there’s a downside to being with someone so demonstrably perfect: It really highlights your own imperfections. Despite the fact that Harry seemed to adore me as a whole, I knew there were things about me that he couldn’t
actually
like. For instance: every part of my body.

It went well beyond turning the lights off and turning my back to him when I undressed, though I did both those things so frequently that one night he just went ahead and turned the lights off for me.

“Why do you want to turn the lights off?” I asked.

“I don’t. But you always do, so…”

“Oh. I thought maybe you didn’t like looking at me.”

“What? That’s crazy.”

“I’m not crazy, I’m just uncomfortable!”

“Right, so I turned them off. Should I turn them back on?”

“No! Sorry! Thank you! I’m not crazy!”

Ah, the old I’m Not Crazy defense. I could have written a hundred analytical essays about the vitality of new wave feminism, but the second I became somebody’s girlfriend, it was all,
I’m not crazy! Do you still love me?! I told you to turn the lights off, please and sorry!

It turns out, you can love someone before you love yourself. It’s just really uncomfortable for both of you. As Harry and I got closer, the issue of my unlovable body grew even bigger between us.

I felt my weight slowly creeping up in those first few months. There’s just not as much time for relentless workouts and Points calculation when you’re occupied with the full-time job of falling in love. And, the shameful truth, I came to realize, was that I had believed all those inane celebrity-interview quotes about how when someone loves you just as you are, all your food and body image issues just evaporate, absorbed by a cloud of a lover’s acceptance—the greatest diet of all. I don’t know what PR rep started this bullshit rumor, but it seems every actress is obligated to repeat it at least once a year. It’s just one of those mandatory quotes like, “I love French fries!” and “I don’t believe in plastic surgery.” Maybe it’s all true, but I’ve never read a male celebrity profile that opens with a line about how pleasantly surprising it is that he ordered whole milk in his latte.

So, I waited for the power of love to heal my every self-doubt, growing more frustrated by the minute. I wasn’t the only one. Going to sleep at night had become something akin to a wrestling match played entirely in the spooning position.

One night at his place, Harry cuddled up behind me and wrapped his arm around my middle: the danger zone. I reached for his hand, pretending an affectionate squeeze, then casually moved it off my stomach and onto my thigh. He played along for a minute, but while nodding off, his hand drifted back to my stomach—my flabby, floppy, stretch-marked stomach. It was my most unacceptable body part, the one I avoided all contact with. I thought I’d made progress the time I let him give me a raspberry, but the revolting, whoopee-cushion sound of it made my whole body cringe. I simply couldn’t let him touch it while I slept; how would I suck it in all night?

The moment his hand fell back to my abdomen, I yanked it off and up to my chest. There. Surely, he’d prefer a handful of breast to belly. Harry sighed.

“What?”

“You never let me touch your tummy.”

“Well, sorry. I don’t like it.”

“Why?”

“I just really don’t like my stomach, okay? I don’t want you to touch it.”

Harry sat up. I turned onto my back, looking up at him in the dark.

“I don’t want to, like, force you into anything. But I just don’t get it. I’ve seen your body. I’ve seen your stomach.”

“Why do you have to touch it, though? Why is it so important?”

“It’s not so important, it’s just…I don’t know. We’ve been together for a while now.”

I felt my eyes begin to fill, not in sadness but burning frustration.

“Yeah, so?”

“So, I’m going to want to touch your tummy.”

“God. Fine.”

“Oh, come on. You don’t think you’re being a little ridiculous?”

“Um, no. Don’t you have parts of yourself you don’t like?”

“I’m hairy. I don’t love that.”

“That’s it?”

“I don’t like my body hair! I have to get my whole upper body waxed just to go to the beach! It’s embarrassing!”

“Well, see then?!” Point mine. Definitely.

“No, because I don’t push you away whenever you come near it.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.” I had no better excuse. “My stomach is just too disgusting.”

Harry and I sat in silence for a minute waiting for someone to play the “I’m Not Crazy” card. Then, he leaned over and pushed up my T-shirt, exposing my stomach.

“Stop.”

“Shhh. Just wait.”

“If you’re going to give me a raspberry right now…”

“I’m not going to give you a raspberry.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Baby, just trust me. Okay?”

It was a tall order, but I took a breath and watched as he leaned down over my exposed, lumpy belly. Very lightly, he kissed it. He kissed the spot beneath my ribs and all the way down to my navel. He kissed across my lower stomach, that wretched expanse where the stretch marks raked across my skin, then up and down my sides. Harry kissed every inch of my horrible flesh with a tenderness so great and loving, and all the while, my eyes stayed clenched tight.
I am loved
, a voice inside me declared.
Just close your eyes and get through this
, said another.
He’s almost done.

Seeing Harry so ardently love what I most loathed about myself was overwhelming. It threw my self-esteem into stark relief, exposing just how not-okay I was with me. He’d call me beautiful in the morning and I’d push my face into the pillow. Out of the blue, he’d pull me in for a kiss and I’d chalk it up to him just being an affectionate person, in general. More than once he’d tell me how happy I made him and I actually answered, “Why?” But these stumbling blocks aside, I knew that what we had was a very good and rare thing.

There was still that restless little nag in my head, always looking down the road to the next milestone and urging me to sprint for it. It only was a matter of months before we started talking about the possibility of moving in together. Well, I started talking about it. Why not? It seemed silly to take things slow when everything was so consistently rose-colored. Sure, I was struggling with some good old-fashioned self-hatred and had gained a terrifying fifteen pounds, but those things would work themselves out if I just kept plowing ahead and waited for the Love Diet to fix everything.