For years, I thought the worst thing my husband could do was make me feel ashamed of my own body. I was wrong. The truth came out at our twentieth-anniversary party, in front of everyone we knew.
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Greg and I met at twenty-six, when I still believed love was mostly a matter of timing and luck. He was loud, charming, and surrounded by friends who slapped his shoulder whenever I entered a room.
“You won the lottery,” they told him.
His only strange habit concerned food.
Greg always smiled as if he wholeheartedly agreed.
His only strange habit concerned food. He watched my plate more closely than his own.
“A woman should always eat less than her man,” he joked on the first night out with his friends.
I laughed because everyone else did. When I reached for another roll, Greg raised one eyebrow.
“Saving room for dessert too?” he asked.
I didn't yet understand how harmful such an insincere kindness could be.
That evening, I replayed the joke while washing my face. It sounded almost harmless. Greg had been affectionate afterward, and I used that tenderness as evidence against my own discomfort. I didn't yet understand how harmful such an insincere kindness could be.
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We married three years later. During his toast, his best friend said, “Keep feeding her compliments, man. You don’t want her realizing she can do better.”
Three years into our marriage, pregnancy changed my body.
Everyone cheered. Greg squeezed my hand hard enough to hurt, then smiled for the cameras.
Three years into our marriage, pregnancy changed my body much more than I'd anticipated. With our first child, Sophie, Greg said almost nothing about my weight.
He brought me crackers when I felt sick and rubbed my feet at night. I decided I had misjudged him. Maybe marriage had made him gentler, more mature, or more secure.
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