The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
My wife is getting fat. She’s not obese or anything, maybe barely overweight, idk. But she’s very clearly growing in her upper pelvis to a degree that’s very obvious if you’re married to her, and still obvious if she’s wearing tight waist-high pants while seated. She looks pregnant in certain clothing, and she’s buying new clothes at an increasing pace to replace her old clothes.
No, she is in fact very beautiful and very fashionable. But I’m worried that I’m not seeing her do anything about it. Her weight gain has been real and obvious over the last year, and I’ve been able to maintain my weight within a 5-lb. range in the same time thanks to my strange eating habits (I often tell her you should adopt normal American eating patterns when you want to look like a normal American. I haven’t convinced her yet.)
She hasn’t gotten to the “I should do something about this,” phase yet—she’s coping somehow. The bigger boobs are helping her do that. She is upset she doesn’t fit into old cute pants and dresses, but she simply jokes about getting fat and is fine because, for now, her clothes mostly still hide the weight gain.
Here’s where I come in. I am absolutely not going to sit down with my wife and tell her that she’s gaining too much weight and should slim down for my sexual gratification. I gently broached weight loss once, when she brought it up, and it didn’t go well. Now I just nod my head or otherwise remain silent when it comes up.
Observations: Couples get fat together. There is never one obese one and one skinny one. Couples get hot together. If a guy is ripped, his partner at least looks like she knows when to put the fork down.
Strategy: All I want is for my wife to have a flatter belly. Flat bellies are hot. My girl’s got hips for days—they drive me crazy, and I want them to shine without her waist getting in the way. This shouldn’t be an impossibly hard problem to solve given the realities of CICO. The mechanism? I think I need to get ripped. Right now I am solidly skinnyfat. Most of my clothes from 5+ years ago still fit comfortably, I’ve been able to avoid growing or even threatening to grow a gut, but my chest is very small and my waist is 1-2 inches bigger than it was when were were newly-weds. I must fix these things. Maybe not get jacked out of my mind, but I need to be toned and lean and look fantastic naked. To silently encourage my wife to achieve the female ideal of “be slim,” I must reach for the much higher male ideal of, “Fully develop every muscle group.”
That’s my plan for this summer I think. (If I fail you’ll never hear about this project again.) I do not want to be a gym rat or get humongous. I just want as much progress as you can possibly get with a pull-up bar and regular time set aside for a serious workout.
What could go wrong? Worst case, my wife has a hotter husband. Am I being mind-blowingly vain? Women, would you be incredibly hurt if you found your husband writing these things about you? If your husband started working out and getting hot out of nowhere, would you feel compelled to act?
What are your own experiences?
I think that this is a tough one. On the one hand, one should love their spouse without regard to physical appearance. But on the other hand, there reaches a point where you just don't find your spouse attractive any more, even if you still love them. And that's not good. These two things are obviously in tension, and it's really hard to say what the right balance is.
I don't think that there's a good answer for you here as far as the situation with your wife goes. I think you have seen already that the impetus for change must come from within her if it's going to work. So you're kind of stuck waiting for her to realize "hey I need to change". Right now it sounds like she's ok with the situation, or at least dislikes the idea of changing her lifestyle more. The problem is that everyone has a different trigger that causes them to change their mind, and it's hard to know in advance what hers will be.
If you do decide to hit the gym, I would focus on doing it for your sake rather than to inspire your wife. You might inspire her, it definitely happens! But I think that if you start working out with the explicit goal to inspire your wife to do better, she might pick up on that and resist it. Plus, you might start to feel resentful if you put in the work to get ripped and she doesn't care to join you. So I would say that you should focus on doing fitness for your own sake, and if your wife decides to join you that's a nice bonus.
I have trouble with this sentiment, not because I disagree with it across all parameters, but because someone's physical appearance reflects real elements of someone's personality and character, it's not just something completely exogenous to who you love. The woman I love is fit, she was fit when I met her, she got more fit during our time together, and we like doing physical things together. Her fitness is reflected in her appearance - she's toned, slender, tanned deeply in the summers, carries herself with the posture of an athletic woman, and so on. You can see this at a glance, the same way that you can see that someone is sedentary from their chubbiness, lack of musculature, slumping posture, and uncoordinated gait.
Contrary to the saying, there's a lot you can tell about a book from its cover.
Sure. But on the other hand that's not always the case. Sometimes people get disfigured in an accident, and I think most would agree it's immoral to leave your wife because she's not attractive any more after a tragic accident. And of course, we all get old and ugly in the end (or die young I suppose), and your relationship needs to be able to withstand that inevitable change. I think that age in particular makes it worth emphasizing the idea that you should love your spouse regardless of what they look like.
Sure, those stipulations make sense, but they don't lead to agreeing with the statement that "one should love their spouse without regard to physical appearance"; evaluating what caused that degradation of appearance is showing regard for their physical appearance. Ailments and disfigurement are tragic and it is obviously the morally correct thing to maintain your love for your partner through them. Aging is not only acceptable, but something that we should do our best to look on with some degree of dignity and appreciation. Neither of these is similar to having a spouse that just decides to stop dressing nicely, stop eating reasonably, or otherwise shows disregard for their own appearance.
Thinking over the examples you provided and the ones I provided, it seems like the key distinction is the underlying cause. In the case of gaining weight it seems like what is a problem is not the physical appearance per se, but rather the fact that your spouse isn't taking care of him/herself any more. In that light it seems fair to say physical appearance isn't important except insofar as it is the symptom of a problem one considers to be a character flaw. What do you think?
I think that's the majority of it, yeah. Falling out of love with someone because they've lost some physical luster is something that has been known to happen but should be vigorously resisted. Falling out of love with someone who has changed their behavior and character is a much deeper challenge.
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It would be a tragic irony if I try to induce internal motivation in my wife if I had none for myself.
Thanks for the warning.
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