Sunday, March 28, 2010

I can't marry you, honey. You're fat now.

Saturday night I'm driving to hang out with some friends. I have on some radio station from a city a couple of hours away. It is one of those talk segments where someone calls in with a problem, and other people call in to give advice. This man's problem is as follows:
"I want to ask my girlfriend to be my wife, but only if she loses weight first."
Apparently, she weighed in about 105 lbs. when they began dating, and gained fifty five pounds over the course of their relationship. The questions posed were, "Is this wrong? Does he really want to get married? Is he shallow?"

In all honesty, at first I was irritated because I felt like if he really wanted to marry her, her size shouldn't matter. People change, right? Then I started thinking, fifty five pounds is a lot of weight, granted she did weigh just 105 pounds which is very tiny, but depending on her body type, that could be a healthy size for her. In that case, weighing 160 pounds instead would be heading towards a health risk. Not to mention relationships are partially due to physical attraction. Period. Maybe he was worried about her health. I don't know.

One girl called in and said he really must not want to marry her if he is that upset about her weight gain. She said if you love a person, you love all of them, faults included. The advice lady retorted.

Advice Lady- "Well, can you say the same thing for someone who smokes? If you are against smoking, is it wrong to ask them to quit before a commitment like marriage?"
Caller - "Well, marriage is unconditional. It should be unconditional love."
AL - "Yes, but honey, marriage is conditional. People get divorced all the time."
Caller - "Well, yes, but that doesn't make it right. He isn't ready to marry her if he doesn't love her for who she is now."


Then a man called in with these comments:

Caller - "The problem isn't that he's shallow, is the way he is presenting the information. Everything is in presentation. He should be saying, "Honey, fitness is important to me and the way I live my life. I want to marry you, but we need to share the same regard for fitness. This way he doesn't sound like he just doesn't love her because she is fat. It's apparent he loves her, I mean he wants to marry her, he just wants her to be healthy. There is nothing wrong with that."

Anywho, I thought it was mildly interesting.