In my humble opinion, the primary reason every woman is willing to wage the battle to get back into the skinny jeans for years is to get love. We equate being skinny with being loved. When you are loved you are important to someone, you matter, you belong, you have a sense of purpose, and most of all you have someone else’s love.
Love for our selves, and love from our family and friends is not enough for most people. We need to have the love of a significant other, the ying to our yang. This need is so powerful that it is a pervasive message in advertising. I mean look at all those Victoria Secret catalogs. They scream to us, if you buy my underwear, you too can be desired and therefore loved. Men look at those ads and want a woman like that or want their woman to be sexy like that, and women look at those same VS ads and think how can I get my body to look hot like that. I can’t wear that underwear until I have that kind of figure. But once I do, I will be able to get a man to love me or my man will love me once again. It sounds silly to read it in print, but be honest; you have at least believed that thought once if not many times in your own life.
I remember throughout all my 20’s and the better half of my early 30’s going to the gym 5-6 days a week to either keep onto my size 10 figure or to get into a size 8. For me, at 5’7”, being a size 6 is too small The one time I was that thin my ribs were sticking out, my hip bones were protruding, and my ass bones hurt sitting on park benches or fold out chairs. It just wasn’t fun for me. A size 8 on the other hand was always my ideal. I always believed that when I could finally be a size 8 that Prince Charming would arrive and I would have the kind of love that I had always dreamed of.
For me though, size 8 came many times, and each time lots of men came along also, but Prince Charming never showed up, and the ones who I thought might be Mr. Charming turned out to be cads. It turns out that a big part of the problem was that these wanna be Charmings were sold be the image I was selling, and not the real me. That of course was my problem, and I didn’t learn that until I started killing off my social selves. It’s so easy to blame the men, and think that all of them are assholes. As you get older and go through a string of assholes, it starts to dawn on you that the only thing in common with all these assholes is you, so therefore the men aren’t the problem, it’s you. Yikes!
