When my boyfriend started picking apart Beyoncé’s body, I said very little. Then I hung up. We had been having the kind of conversation we’d had before: famous people everyone seems to find attractive, and whether we actually agree. This time, he went from not seeing the appeal to talking about her cellulite with outright disgust. I’m a bigger woman. I have cellulite, too.
He called back, but I silenced the phone and told him we’d talk later. Usually, his exaggerated rants about things that annoy him make me laugh. That’s part of what made this one land so badly. I had been expecting another funny complaint from the man I’ve been with for two years. Instead, I was suddenly thinking about what it would feel like to take my clothes off in front of him again.
I’m 38 and he’s 50. We’re long distance, and most of our relationship has been good. Talking about celebrities we don’t find especially attractive wasn’t new territory for us. We could recognize someone’s talent or success without understanding why the whole world seemed to fancy them. Those conversations hadn’t usually involved this kind of detailed criticism of someone’s body.
When he brought up Beyoncé, I disagreed. I think she’s gorgeous. His response was far harsher than a difference in taste. I don’t need us to have matching opinions about every famous woman. But hearing him mock a feature I have made the conversation feel painfully personal, even though he wasn’t talking about me.
There was already something between us that made it difficult to shrug off. Despite my efforts, we have almost no sex life. There’s no sexual connection happening at a distance, and during his visits we’ve had sex just twice in total. That has bothered me. He has reassured me about his attraction so many times that I had stopped worrying about it. Now those reassurances feel harder to hold on to.
His comment doesn’t prove what he thinks of my body. I know that. Finding a celebrity unattractive doesn’t automatically mean he finds his girlfriend unattractive, and I’m not pretending I can read his mind. What I can’t shake is how easily the contempt came out. I heard him ridicule cellulite, then found myself wondering how much of myself I would want him to see.
I’m not comparing my looks to hers. I don’t need to be on some celebrity’s level to want to feel desired by my own boyfriend. The painful comparison is between the comfort I thought we had and the self-consciousness I’m feeling now.
I’ve been planning and working toward a future with him. That makes the doubt bigger than one miserable phone call: I’m afraid I’ve been building toward a relationship in which he wants my emotional support but doesn’t really want me sexually. It’s a fear, not something he has admitted or something I have discovered. For now, I’ve told him we’ll talk later. The man whose reassurance used to settle this is the same man I’m not sure I could feel comfortable being naked with.
