Dating : I’m Scared I’ll be Fetishized for My Fat

And it’s one of the few things keeping me from dating again.

There are a few reasons I haven’t been back on the dating scene in years, and all of them have to do with my low self-esteem.

For one thing, I’m almost 37 years old and I’m living with my parents. The situation is what I need right now and it’s working out for me and my daughter, but it’s hard to explain away without feeling like a loser to a potential date.

Plus, I don’t have a “real” job right now. I’m subsisting off child support and the few hundred dollars a month I make writing, but it’s not enough (yet) to get me to a place where I can live independently again.

And finally, I’m fat.

At this moment, I’m about five pounds down from the fattest I’ve ever been, and I feel awful about my body.

The other day my daughter found an old t-shirt of mine in the bowels of the closet that fits her thirteen year old body snugly.

I was once that small, as an adult. Before I had a child. Before I ate all that peanut butter directly after having said child and gaining more rather than losing the baby weight.

Now that it’s been a few years since I’ve been in a relationship and I’ve gained fifty pounds since the last time I’ve dated, there’s something else that’s keeping me from logging on to OKCupid and updating my profile:

I accept my body for what it is, but begrudgingly.

I wish I could be one of those women who proudly loves their body, rolls and all, but the truth is, I don’t.

I’m disgusted with myself that I’ve let my weight get so out of control these past two years and I worry that others will be disgusted, too.

But even more, I worry that someone will want to get off on my fat.

I don’t want my fat body to be someone else’s fetish.

I just want out of my fat body.

I hear it all the time that I shouldn’t worry about my weight when it comes to dating, that people love all kinds, that there is someone out there for me who will love me in spite of my fat body.

And then I hear of the people who really, really love fat girls.

Who want desperately to push their faces into our soft bellies, jerk themselves off in between our rolls of fat.

I’ve heard of people who get off on feeding fat women, or just watching us eat.

That’s all well and good for some people, but it’s not for me.

And I’m scared that I won’t be able to tell the difference between people until it’s too late — are you picking me despite my fat, or because of it?

And why does it matter so much to me?

I think it’s because I’m actively trying to lose weight now when I wasn’t before.

Now, I’m conscious of every bite that goes into my mouth and I’m weighing myself every week to see how I am progressing. (Slowly, if you were wondering.)

I have no room in my life right now for people who WANT me to continue to remain fat, and so I feel like I’m stuck in this weird body/dating limbo where I feel like I can’t start dating until I’m happy with the body I’m in, and who knows how long that will take?

I know this is a problem of my own self perception and more of a reflection of how I think of myself than how others think of fat bodies as sexual bodies.

Maybe if I were comfortable with my fat I would be okay with someone else loving on it so purposefully, but I’m not.

I want a partner who supports my weight loss efforts, not one who cheers me on when I eat cake.

Clearly, I have a lot of work to do in my mind as well as my body, because it’s my own damn self that is holding me back from dating and finding the partner that I so crave.

I just wish there was some sort of Fetish-O-Meter to find out what I’m dealing with before I’m faced with dealing with it naked.