Since then, my weight has attracted some attention. Most of it negative. I feel unusually fond of the man who wanted to blow raspberries on my thighs. He’s a superhero compared with some. I heard from a man who’d seen both the before and after pictures and felt the need to inform me why he wasn’t going to be asking me out.
He’s a doctor, you see, and when he sees obesity, he sees death. The very old people on the streets are never the obese ones, he chided. Obese? I’ll admit to roundedness, yes. A little cake at the hips and belly. OK, about 20lb of cake. But, you know what, I look all right. I’m heavier than I was at 35, but still in proportion, and I can still run up four flights of stairs at work without cardiac incident. I told him this, perhaps slightly defensively, my heart pounding in my ears. I pointed out that I hadn’t asked for a date; I’d hoped that this process was as much about making new friends and widening your circle as about being invited out to dinner. (It isn’t. It really isn’t.) He said that my thinner pictures were unnecessarily coy and should be abandoned altogether. I think what he was really saying was that they’re a form of false advertising.
“There are plenty of nice men who are into bigger girls,” he wrote, “and so it’s counter-productive to fail to admit to being one of them, because it won’t work out and you’re wasting your time. And ours, to be frank.” I looked at the honest photographs. Bigger girls? I’m a “bigger girl”? Later, he wrote again. He was sorry he’d been so tactless; he was overloaded with work. “I’m sure you’re a lovely woman,” he wrote. “You have knockout dark eyes and sensual lips, and a very nicely turned ankle. It’s just that every day I see the cost to health of obesity.” I looked at his profile pictures more closely; the one showing him on a boat with his pals revealed a hint of a paunch and the beginnings of a double chin. The bloody nerve!
“Midlife online dating is a buyer’s market,” I said to a girlfriend over lunch, “and men are the buyers. Women are the merchandise offered for perusal.”
“It’s only one guy, one joyless berk,” she consoled. “Darling, you’re gorgeous. Barely even fat at all.”
But the truth was, there had been others. Two others. A bloke had already written that he could see that if we got together there would have to be fruit for pudding. “A woman needs to keep paying attention to her physical beauty,” he said, when I told him he was rude. Then there was the diet specialist who said I should pick him as a boyfriend because he could help me lose weight.
Romance is perhaps a dangerous thing, but this was a tad too far in the other direction. When I turned him down, he wrote: “Can I politely suggest that if you don’t want comments about your size, you remove references to it from your profile.” (I’d never go out with anyone who used the phrase “Can I politely suggest …”. They are like the people who start sentences with “No offence but …”. It’s passive-aggressive.) But he was right, the doctor, that there’s a market for the larger lady, distasteful though that phrase is. I know someone – an ample, lusciously curvy woman, big all over – and she’s highly in demand … though only with men she doesn’t want to meet.
As is the way of things, a bad week made me vulnerable to a whole raft of bad ideas: there was a midnight ice-cream binge with Cameron Diaz, and an only just averted purchase of a hovel in southern Bulgaria, before I hit the rapids, the white water, and messaged Peter to ask why he doesn’t want to see me, if I’m wonderful, and why he so very obviously regretted meeting me.
