Ay yi yi, I can’t believe I’m writing a stranger on the internet for advice but I love my fiance so much and I don’t know who else to talk to about this. You seem very tactful and I think tact is going to be a big requirement in my situation, so here goes!

My fiance and I have been together for 2.5 years, we got engaged after a year and we’re getting married in November of this year. I’m so excited and I love him so much. We’re talking about having kids soon after the wedding and we’re currently looking to buy a house together. He’s my best friend bar none and our relationship has always been great in all aspects…except for one…recently.

How to put this…my fiance, he’s a big guy. He’s six foot five and he’s just big, he always has been. Not a bean pole is what I’m saying. When we first got together he was a little chubby around the middle but I didn’t care, I thought (and still think) he was hot and I’m certainly not walking around with washboard abs so who am I to throw stones? Since we’ve been together, particularly in the last year, he’s gained a lot of weight. It’s ALL around his middle and his face. I’m not kidding about that, if you saw his arms and his legs separately you would think they belonged to a very fit person.

So here’s the thing, we’ve talked about losing weight together before the wedding and just in general to take care of ourselves more, these talks are always brought up by me. Like I said, I’m not a skinny Minnie myself, I would definitely categorize myself as slightly chubby. He usually says that he plans on losing weight before the wedding but he’s not into joining a gym, trying any kinds of diets (he is a PICKY eater) or anything like that. Basically, I want us to do it together, he wants to do it alone. That is more of an aside, here is the real problem…

Over the past seven or eight months (the period of time that he’s put on the bulk of all his extra weight) our sex life has been…painful. I don’t know how else to put it but seriously, it hurts. He’s heavy, I can’t have him on top of me for long periods of time and while we try other positions (I’m sorry, this is going to be icky), his gut gets in the way. That’s blunt but it’s the truth. And it’s not just the weight that I can’t handle, his stomach gets in the way and makes intercourse really painful for me, I think because it has to happen at a weird angle due to the way he has to hold himself up so as not to crush me.

The thing is, we’ve talked about how much our sex life has changed (we fool around a lot still, but there’s VERY little actual intercourse) and he seems totally and utterly clueless that that’s why. Even though whenever we’re trying I usually have to ask him to hold himself up because I’m having a hard time breathing. I try to sort of hint at the fact that he’s too heavy for me but he hasn’t caught on.

Once or twice we’ve been talking about it and he’s asked if I’m no longer attracted to him and I’ve of course said no. I am attracted to him!! I’m just a) honestly worried about his health and b) really unable to support the extra weight on top of me and the new angle required by that.

I don’t know what to do, the issue is really putting a damper on our sex life and we’re both aware of the damper, but I’m the only one who seems to be aware of the reason for it. We’re very open with each other and I think he would tell me if he could really see a reason for the problem. He just keeps asking me if I know why it hurts so much, is something wrong with me, do I feel okay, is there anything he can do differently…I really can’t find a tactful way to say that I love him and I’m attracted to him and I really do WANT to have sex, but I really have a hard time doing so when he’s so big. He takes things kind of hard and he internalizes a lot of guilt and anger at himself and I feel like if I told him the truth he would take it as “You’re fat and I’m disgusted” and not “I love you and I want you to be healthy and I want our sex life to be rocking again so let’s go play tennis more often together so that we can totally get it on.”

There’s the added sensitivity about the fact that his family is all rather large and his sister had her stomach stapled (I’m sorry, I don’t know what the official term for that is) shortly after he and I met. When I asked him about it (keep in mind, we’d only been dating a few weeks) he didn’t really want to talk about it, and when he did finally open up about it he admitted that he was not only just worried about his sister, but fearful that he would wind up in the same boat.

I don’t even get how he gains the weight, he’s not a lazy or lethargic person, he takes the dog out twice a day on long walks, he’s pretty active, and he plays a ton of golf (which I know is not exactly the world’s most aerobic sport but come on, three or four rounds of golf a week has to at least help you maintain your weight!). I feel that his two biggest problems are 1) he eats A LOT of fried food and 2) he loves beer. And he doesn’t just love beer in that “guy who loves to watch sports and drink beer all day” kind of way, he actually likes going to beer tastings and learning about the different ways they make different beers, et cetera. So he drinks a lot of beer because he likes it a lot. Which is fine, but it’s a lot and it’s not exactly a slimming drink.

Okay, I think I’m done, feel free to edit down the length I just wanted you to have all the info. I just want to save our sex life and I want him to be healthy, hear disease runs in his family and that’s scary.

Any advice?

Thanks,
Undersexed Worry Wart

I have what, at least for me, is a doozy of a question. The same as so many letters, I have to start out with, “So, there’s this boy…”

A bit of background: I’m fresh (well, about half a year or so) out of college, and I’m currently teaching English in a foreign country. I’m in a pretty small, rural area, so my social interactions tend to be limited to the other four teachers for the same company in this city.

About three weeks after I arrived in this country and began getting to know the other teachers and whatnot, I did something I still regret: I got completely wasted at a party and wound up sleeping with one of my co-workers (who was also completely trashed at the time). I found him attractive, but there were no real feelings on either side. When we both sobered up, in fact, there was much guilt and bad feelings all around. Said co-worker — let’s call him Boy With Issues, or BWI for short — happens to not be single. As a matter of fact, he and his girlfriend got engaged two weeks later, and shortly thereafter, I found out that she was pregnant. Whenever I see them, they look disgustingly happy together, which made me think, “Okay, it was a mistake, but no serious harm done, I hope…” He and I half-tacitly agreed to keep it a secret and pretend that it never happened.

For a long time afterwards, BWI treated me as a sort of subhuman, which I do find at least slightly understandable. I mean, every time he looked at me, I’m sure he was reminded of what he had done, which I believed that he regretted terribly. So I basically decided to roll with the punches; sure, it takes two to tango, and though there are gaps in my memory, I’m completely sure that I wasn’t the initiator, but I knew that BWI had a girlfriend. I felt like complete scum for quite a while afterwards as well, but there seemed to be no harm done, and eventually (really, just within the last couple of weeks or so), he started treating me a bit more like a person again.

In the meantime, I sort of fell into the role of the Office Ditz. It was easy, and it kept things from turning nasty (after all, if I’m the sort of girl who’s got her head in the clouds all the time and can hurt herself with a friggin’ pillow, BWI won’t see me as a threat and will maybe be nicer to me), but the downside is that no one here, with the exception of my roommate (hereafter referred to as…Roommate), takes me at all seriously.

Okay, background over. On to last night. Roommate and I hosted a small party — it was just the five of us — and there was a lot of drinking going on. I got mildly tipsy, the others got much drunker.

In the middle of the party, BWI threw a Kahlua bottle at me. I can’t remember exactly why, but I seem to recall it being in drunken good fun (or at least, I like to think so). Of course, now I have a rather painful bruise on my hand. He also drunkenly tossed a couple of other bottles my way, but those, at least, were empty. I put it out of my mind and got on with the evening.

At the end of the evening, BWI was very, very drunk, so Roommate offered to let him crash at our place for the night on a spare mattress. When it was just the three of us, I noticed that Roommate (so drunk she couldn’t walk a straight line if her life depended on it) and BWI were acting awfully cozy together: holding hands, and just general touchy-feely-ness. Warning bells began to go off in my head, and I decided to keep an eye on them for as long as necessary, and keep them drinking water. So, they would drink their glasses of water, and hold them out to me for refills. One time, completely randomly, BWI gave me his glass to refill and then, without warning, slapped me across the face. Hard. In such situations, my instinct is just to laugh it off and try not to take it personally… It didn’t really occur to me that I should have been angry until a bit later. If I recall correctly, my response was more along the lines of, “Oww! Don’t do that! … Here’s your water.”

By about 3:30 AM, BWI apparently decided that he’d had enough and wanted to be alone with Roommate, so he put me to bed (as though I were a five-year-old…I went along with it for the moment). The second he turned out my light and slammed my door shut, I was up out of bed and listening at the door. It’s not that I’m the nosy type, it’s that I didn’t want Roommate to make the same mistake I did, and I didn’t want either of them to do something they would regret before the sun rose. So, I’m standing at my door, shaking like a leaf, and listening for the correct moment to intervene. I didn’t want to come charging out of my room like an enraged rhinoceros if all they were doing was talking.

Anyhow, the moment to intervene came (Roommate was strong and just sober enough to turn down his advances, but was having a hell of a time trying to get him to give up and go to sleep, and, she told me afterwards, was only a few minutes away from possibly succumbing). I stepped out into the hall, she mouthed, “Help me,” to me, so, of course, I did. I got him more water, didn’t leave them alone, hid the remainder of the alcohol, and sat with them until he finally realized what he was doing and turned into Mr. Remorseful. He left shortly afterwards.

So, at long last, here’s my question. It’s sort of a general “what should I do?” and breaks up into a couple of smaller questions.

First, regarding BWI’s (pregnant) fiancee: she’s a wonderful person and I like her a lot. Should she be made aware of his philandering ways while drunk? Because, one drunken indiscretion? Sucks, but it happens. Two drunken indiscretions, though (that I know of)? Especially when the M.O. was so similar that the deja vu really creeped me out? I know that he really does love his fiancee a lot — I think he’s very young and a bit scared of this whole sudden “marriage and fatherhood” thing, and I’m not sure how much of it was really his choice. It’s no excuse, of course, and if I had a fiance, I would want to know if he cheated on me, but…it seems wrong for me to get involved in that situation at all, especially after being the person he cheated with. I don’t want to be responsible for breaking them up, particularly as she’s like, six or seven months pregnant now.

Secondly, I’m really sick and tired of how BWI treats me. I’m sure that he hates himself far more than he hates me, but honestly, when physical abuse starts, even if it’s influenced by alcohol, it’s time for it all to stop. The problem is that our little community is so small that if one person is unhappy, or if even two of us openly dislike each other, it makes things really miserable for everyone. I know that I have a right to stand up for myself, but I don’t want to be responsible for making hanging out uncomfortable for everyone. In such a different culture, sometimes all we’ve really got is each other. So how can I make it clear to him that what he’s doing is not okay without dredging up ugliness? (Particularly since odds are that he doesn’t remember throwing the bottle or slapping me…)

And thirdly, do you think it’s too late to get people to take me at all seriously? I don’t mind being the butt of an occasional joke — hell, sometimes it’s fun — but when I’m the butt of every joke, it stops being fun. I’m aware that I kind of brought this upon myself, but I just want to be me again.

So there’s my pathetic little soap opera. Advice would be appreciated, no matter how harsh.

Signed,
Tired of Playing the Fool (and of bruises)

I have this friend. Let’s call her Gina. We were new in town at the same time, we got on pretty well, we spent a lot of time together, and we helped each other out in various ways, but we were never super-close, even after knowing each other for a few years. Over the last several months, I’ve realized I no longer enjoy hanging out with her. She’s an interrupter, and a contradictor, and she’s self-righteous and loud, and she overshares details of her (boring!) sexual exploits. I think this is basically just the way she is, and although she has many fine qualities and can sometimes be a really fun person and I’m sure she’ll make someone an excellent friend some day, I’m just not interested in continuing our friendship.

Once I recognized this, I started trying to ease off a little. I’ve been busy, or even just “busy”” a lot of the time when she tries to get us together. A lot of times I really am busy –- I have a very demanding job and am often out of town -– but I have even used some pretty lame excuses, including “I need to clean out the fridge.” We do still get together once in a while, but I can’t remember the last time I initiated any kind of contact with her. On those occasions when we do get together I’ve got a little shorter with her when she interrupts, although I still don’t call her on her shit as much as I should, maybe.

Here’s the problem: I feel really guilty about this. I don’t think she has any other close women friends, except possibly a few people from the office. Since the beginning of our relationship I think maybe she has put a higher value on our friendship than I have. Worst of all, I’m afraid she’s going to ask me why I’m breaking off our friendship –- I’m sure she already has some idea of where this is going.

My questions: I’m not wrong to break off this friendship, am I? Do I owe her an explanation? If she asks for an explanation, what should I say?!

Can’t fix her, can’t stand her