In an article for Forbes magazine Virgie Tovar, a “leading expert on weight bias”, takes aim at critics of the romance in the Netflix blockbuster Bridgerton between the Nicola Coughlan character (very curvy, 5ft 1in) and the Luke Newton character (borderline skinny).
These critics are wrong, Tovar argues, when they say that the depiction of lust and love between people of considerably varying weight is unrealistic. I agree, and not just because Bridgerton is set in early 19th-century London, when people had radically different ideas about sexual and marital attraction than they do now.
The piece was headlined: “Bridgerton: are we still not ready for a mixed-weight romance on screen?” It’s a topical question. In recent months we’ve also had sex scenes featuring a large woman in bed with a much less large man in season two of The Tourist.
Tovar wanted to make the point that in real life “mixed-weight” couples are commonplace, “the heart [and, ahem, other organs] wants what it wants”, to quote Emily Dickinson’s deathless wisdom, whereas on screen, they are still pretty much taboo.
Cue outrage! And not from militant fat-shamers but from the people Tovar seeks to defend, who took umbrage at her using the term “mixed weight” at all, as if to register someone’s size is the same as making a judgment on it.
Advertisement
They made one fair point, though, those people managing to take offence with their own advocate, and that is “mixed-weight” couples have actually been on screen as long as screens have existed, except they’ve all been a plus-sized guy/slim woman combo. (And often, old guy/young woman, or average guy/pretty woman.)
Nobody much commented on it, except when Catherine Zeta-Jones, then 29, tried to seduce Sean Connery (then almost 70) in Entrapment in 1999. Just like, in real life, we see Trump (old, fat, unprepossessing) with Melania (much younger, slim, hot) and shrug, but we see Macron and Brigitte (both slim, to be fair) and go: “That’s weird.” Double standards.
Not so long ago, however, the pairing of a slim man with an overweight woman was routine in popular culture. That double act, the stuff of saucy seaside postcards in the mid-20th century, was actually played out in my own parents’ marriage. Throughout my childhood in the 1970s, as my parents advanced through their forties, my dad stayed trim, my mum got bigger and bigger. That gender difference was not unusual. For my generation, as we have gone through middle age, things have changed. It is now more likely to be the man who could stand to lose some extra timber.
That was the case for many years, up until 12 months ago, in my relationship. When my (future) wife, Nicola, and I got together, aged 25 in 1990, we were both in good nick. Over the ensuing decades, she remained so, her weight barely varying, BMI bang in the middle of healthy. My trajectory has been somewhat different.
I ought to weigh about 12.5st, which is what I do now, but for much of the past 35 years I was consistently 2st heavier. For a period, in the dark days of a prolonged heavy-drinking, not-going-out crisis in my early fifties, I was 3.5st heavier than optimal. At a Boris Johnsonian 16st, I was officially obese, twice Nicola’s weight, fully 50lb more than what I weigh now.
Advertisement
• My husband is overweight — how can I persuade him to improve his health?
Carrie Johnson could no doubt relate. The difference is, Carrie knew what she was getting, just as the Newton bloke in Bridgerton knew. He saw Coughlan’s character, he fancied her, it isn’t anybody’s business to say that he shouldn’t.
But my Nicola hadn’t signed up to share a bed with a man who struggled to get into 42in jeans. Neither have most people in long relationships whose partner gets fat. To her credit, she wasn’t cruel, she didn’t reject me. But, equally to her credit, neither did she allow me to accept being overweight, not least because she knew it was physically unhealthy and emotionally undermining to be like that. She never pretended she wouldn’t prefer it, in every conceivable way, if there were 30lb less of me.
I prefer it too. This is where I part company with those keen to celebrate, as opposed to simply not persecute, excess weight. It is absolutely no comment on Coughlan or anybody else to say fundamentally most people do not want to be fat.
And not because slimmer people (or “society”, or the media) are judging you, but because you yourself would be happier being lighter. It’s like when rich people born poor say that money doesn’t necessarily make them happy, and it certainly doesn’t make them a better person, yet still, those who have known both states know which one they prefer. So do their romantic partners.
