Every week, Danny Ortberg and Nicole Cliffe discuss a Prudie letter. This week: the husband’s weight fetish.
Danny: I feel like sometimes people write in to me (and those people are usually women) with the assumption that if their partner likes something in bed, it’s their job to find a way to be cool with it unless something really extreme happens
and sure, generally, I’m for approaching the unfamiliar with an open mind
Nicole: Absolutely
but this is bodily autonomy
Danny: but you actively dislike this, it is a turnoff for you, it makes you feel self-conscious and contradicts his bland assurance that he’ll love you no matter what you look like, he’s been vague about just how serious this is versus how much it’s a fantasy
you can ask him to stop saying this entirely! this is now no longer part of your foreplay
Nicole: Yes, active turnoff as opposed to “can put up with it”
Danny: yeah, you just get to hate this and take it off the table! he can console himself by getting to still enjoy having sex with you, he’ll be fine
i also don’t love that he didn’t ask more questions early on about how you felt about this kind of talk
Nicole: And you may be able to find a way to find some form of compromise that doesn’t make you wildly uncomfortable
Danny: if you’re going to introduce something as potentially mind-fuck-y as feeder/gainer dynamics, you need to check in a lot before you start churning out the sexy patter
Nicole: Maybe you eat a Snickers bar before sex and that is all and it is the only thing you do.
Danny: so the fact that he just went for it without saying, “hey, might my wife have a thought or feeling about my eroticizing her weight gain/asking her to gain more weight for my sexual gratification?” makes me think you need to go back and make it clear that that’s not on
Nicole: Yeah I did not love that at all
Danny: if you felt kind of into the dynamic, sure, eat a candy bar pre-sex, but you don’t like the dynamic!
i say no trying to meet him in the middle on this one
because what’s more important is that he start talking about his kinks/fetishes in a different way in the future
he has to go back and learn autonomy/sensitivity/checking in 101 stuff
before you can consider what you may or may not be interested in doing to accommodate him
Nicole: That is absolutely the case, and it’s for sure on him, I’m just hoping that there’s eventually a benign way to find something that doesn’t bother you which can be incorporated into your sex life. But you are correct it’s a down the road convo after some Real Talk
Danny: yes, definitely
if he’d brought this up in a different way, and you felt overall really confident about his willingness to respect your boundaries and limits, sure we could talk about ways to eroticize a waffle every now and again
Nicole: And it’s interesting to me that he seems to have been able to have had a satisfying sex life w her for the previous 15 years
Prior to the weight gain
Danny: yeah that is a good point
it sounds more like this is a sudden lapse for him rather than a lifelong pattern
Nicole: He may honestly not have realized before that it was part of his particular sexual desire collection and went in way too fast
Danny: buddy just got way too enthusiastic about realizing a brand-new sexual delight and forgot to check in with his wife
Nicole: right!
COMMUNICATION
Danny: yeah i think it’s a fault of overenthusiasm rather than a sign he’s necessarily a jerk
but that’s where you have to go back and be super-clear that this isn’t something you are sometimes into and sometimes turned off by, this is really unappealing to you and you actually don’t feel like he’s going to support you if you lose some weight
Nicole: Especially since he probably got good feedback initially for being not a jerk about her weight gain
Danny: so the approach can be more “I know this is a little unusual for you, let’s get back to our old way of communicating”
Nicole: I could see this steamrolling
Danny: right!
Nicole: I think this can be okay but it’s not now and I’m glad she wrote in
Danny: I think so too!
certainly I don’t mean you need to bring the hammer down or make him feel like a jerk for liking your new body
Nicole: Absolutely.
But you can also be “I do not want a feeder dynamic”
Danny: “new body” you know what i mean, newish body developments
YEP!
Nicole: And if this has woken him up to a realization that he NEEDS that, well, it cannot be with you.
Danny: yeah if this is a dynamic he really needs, he can enjoy that dynamic in his head; you can enjoy a different dynamic in your head
