Love and Marriage and Weight Loss

"Mahwidge. Mahwidge is whut bwings us togethah today."

If you don't know what movie that line is from, then perhaps I think your license to be a human being should be revoked. It should be a law, dammit.

Awesome movies aside, marriage is something that is very important to me and helps define who I am and what I do. I guess it kinda helps that I am currently in a marriage myself to The Husband.

Marriage is so important to The Husband and I that we have become involved in the area of what we like to call "Marriage Health" through the church that we belong to. We have what are called "small groups" where we get together with other people, be they single, dating, engaged, married, divorced, whathaveyou and discuss Biblically-based principals that have been found to help two people "become one."

What this means is that we are both TOTALLY unqualified as counselors, but by God we're here to help show you some tools that can help you make your own marriage work better. No seriously. This stuff really works.

And if we had had these tools oh, say, twelve years ago? Our marriage would be a thing for the annals of history by now. Romeo and Juliet? They wouldn't have had a damn thing on us. And we wouldn't have had a whole lot of really really stupid fights and a whole lot of salt and tears would not have exited my body throughout the years and The Husband would not have been exasperated with me to the point of wanting to shoot me and go bury the body in the back yard or drop it into a deep abandoned mineshaft. And vice versa. Let's be fair. We're both human. And highly annoying at times.

One of our old fights used to be about size. More specifically, my size. You see, when we were first together, I had just lost 20 pounds in a month because my ex-fiance finally up and moved out after nine months of hell because he cheated on me and I forgave him and then he waffled and . . . basically I was very depressed. I could only manage to eat one meal a day, if that, and so I lost weight. Go figure. However, ex-fiance moved in with The Husband and then a few months later I moved in with The soon-to-be Husband and ex-fiance moved out. Again. And that, as they say, is history.

But back to my size. Having just lost that much weight in a very short period of time, I was interested in losing more, and I honestly thought I could. I looked damn hot and wanted to look hotter, especially for my new man. However I hadn't realized that by getting together with The Husband I was dooming myself. When I'm happy, I eat, as opposed to starving myself, and that means that I can't lose weight. But by God I was going to lose another 20 pounds. And I promised The Husband this. In return for him quitting smoking. Needless to say, neither of us have followed through on our promises. *sigh*

Anyway, it was a pattern for the longest time as my weight gradually crept up that about once every few months or so The Husband would get pissy that I had never followed through on my promise to lose more weight. This would create a scene and many tears would flow because damnit, I wanted to lose the weight but for some reason I couldn't. And if I did, then it just came right back on when I went off the diet. Maintenance was something my body just could not do. And The Husband just didn't understand why I couldn't just use enough self-control or will power do do this thing! Since he was blessed with an awesome metabolism, he didn't understand (and neither did I at the time) that my metabolism is slower than a three-toed sloth.

So, as those of you who have struggled with weight loss along with me know, this sort of thing just didn't work and only made for unnecessary tension between us as well as further driving my self-esteem even more into the ground.

Now to bring this back around to the whole "Marriage Health" thing, we were in one of our small group sessions about two years ago, watching a DVD by John and Liz Haywood discussing some common problems in marriage. John related that one of the problems with men is that they wanted to fix everything. That every time their wives came to them with complaints about something, they wanted to get out the toolbelt and make it right. But that wasn't what their wife wanted - she just wanted to be understood, get out some of her frustrations, or just get out some of the 20,000 extra words that she needed to use up for that day.

On the trip home from the church, The Husband was kind of quiet. Usually he liked to discuss what had gone on in the group, and sometimes we came up with new subjects to bring up with the group. No worries. He was probably tired or something.

When we got home, he took me by the hand and led me to our bedroom and pulled me onto the bed. And then he began to apologize. You see, The Husband realized that he had been doing the exact thing John Haywood had been talking about, except only with my weight. It obviously was a defect in me, and it was up to him, the Knight in Shining Armor, to make it all better for me, the Damsel in Distress, and show me how to FIX this problem that I obviously had. And that I was going to like it whether I wanted to or not.

After I picked up my jaw from off of the floor, he continued by saying that he was sorry that he had been so critical for all those years. That he would never again start that fight over my weight and the lack of my losing it. That he loved me the size that I was and that even if I gained another 200 pounds he would still love me. So long as I still had a good pair of boobies, that is.

And that's when yet again I knew that I had a keeper.

Artwork in this post is copywrited by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law.