There was a man I used to watch on YouTube, single and in his late 30s, who I thought was so cute. He was Asian and overweight. I didn’t know him, obviously, but I liked watching him. That attraction was there before the night I started trying to explain everything away.
On a night out, I met a Kazakh man who was also overweight, and I was drawn to him in a way I hadn’t experienced before. I wanted to be close to him. I’ve never been all over someone quite like that.
We kissed. Nothing else happened, and later I slept beside him because I didn’t want to leave. That’s the part I keep returning to: I wanted to stay. At the time, being near him was exactly where I wanted to be.
While we were out, a random guy walked past and made a comment about how he’d managed to get me. A stranger had apparently decided that the two of us required an explanation. I wish I could say his opinion meant nothing, but I’m still remembering it.
The next day, I felt ashamed of myself. I tried to file the whole thing under being extremely drunk, as though that would settle it. Except I knew I had liked him. Calling it a drunken act didn’t quite fit what had happened.
Then I saw a TikTok featuring someone’s Chinese father, who was also fat, and found him attractive too. So there went my attempt to treat the night out as some isolated exception. I recognized the attraction immediately.
I’m 21, and I’ve only dated white guys before. Being attracted to overweight Asian men feels unfamiliar enough that I keep questioning it. I don’t experience it as a fetish, but I’m worried about what it means anyway.
What confuses me most is the gap between the night itself and the next morning. I liked kissing him. I liked being beside him. Why am I working so hard to turn that into something I should feel bad about?
