Tom's Love Quest

Dear [Ballerina],

Hi. How are you? I hope you’re well and that you remember me, because it’s been five years since we last spoke. You remember that summer of 2004 when I winked at you on the web. I wanted you from the first time I glimpsed the pictures you put up there. I figured that you wouldn’t respond because women who look as good as you rarely do. Your face reminded me of Helen of Troy because, in another time, just like hers did, yours would have launched a thousand ships as well. So I was not surprised that you didn’t respond right away.

In fact when you did, a month and a half later, I’d all but forgotten who you were, but was pleased that you wrote nonetheless. Then, right away we began emailing and swapping pictures, and then, a couple weeks later, talking on the phone. I tell you that you made September of 2004 one of the most romantic months of my life, for I’ve never felt the passion for a woman more strongly, than I did for you. Your memory to this day in 2009 fills my heart with joy, and my eyes with tears.

Yours is a great memory. But it’s a sad one too. I never got over how things so abruptly ended, and what’s more, I never understood it. So I never had closure. You just stopped communicating one day without any explanation, and that was that. Our relationship was suddenly through, though in my view, we were just getting started on the most wonderful journey ever.

I still wonder what drove you away, and since I never had anything from you afterwards to go on, I can only guess at what it was. I suspect several factors. But I’ll only talk about one in this letter.

You remember in early October I came to Pittsburgh to see you? You’d just visited me a week earlier and you spent one night here. I remember that you sure liked TV, as you watched mine all night long. We had such a good time then, that we decided that I’d visit you this time. So I came out and you picked me up at the train station, and drove us to your apartment in South Hills. I met your son and daughter then, and your son and I helped your daughter with her math homework. That was so much fun.

Well, during the second afternoon of my visit, I walked into your kitchen to find you cooking our supper. I stood in the doorway watching you for what could have been an hour, but what only felt like a few seconds. Your hair was just the right length. Your skin was fair and healthy. Your east European accent was so cute, as you called out orders to your kids to help with the meal. Your legs were strong yet long and intensely sexy, and nowhere on you was there even one extra ounce of fat. You were the healthy woman I’d been seeking for decades, and with more people in the US obese today than not, believe me I considered you quite the find.

In old Europe, you could have been a queen, and I’d have gladly worshipped you too because everything about you, and I mean everything, was perfect. The way you walked, the way you talked, the way you smiled and watched me so intensely as I spoke; it was all so wonderful. The way you cooked, the way you cared, the way you wanted to serve was so very charming and disarming.

I fell in love with you then, standing in that doorway, and I didn’t just suspect that I’d fallen. I knew it positively. These indescribably sweet feelings of pleasure and peace swirled in my mind and brought me close to fainting. The sense that my decades-long search for my dream girl was finally over flooded my entire being, and if I was a believer in God, I might describe this moment as Him, making a miracle. With one loud snap of his fingers, he drove any doubts I had about you and how quickly things were moving between us, away from my heart, and in that instant I would have married you. I would have thrown all caution to the wind and had no misgivings about doing so either.

What I was feeling then, was precisely opposite to the pains of loneliness and missing fulfillment that I’d come to know so well in my life. But all that had changed this weekend as I watched you cooking that meal. Every last painful emotion from past relationships disappeared. Not one voice in my head said that you might be wrong for me. In fact, they all argued profusely that you were so, so right.

I was certain that our sex had been, and would continue to be phenomenal. This was important to me because I’d always wanted good sex but never found it consistently; until it showed up in you. So this was another reason I valued you so much. I’d been looking for someone like you for so long and was desperate to end the search.

Then, there you were, the embodiment of my salvation. You were the first woman in twenty-five years who could make me hard with but a single look or just one kiss, or a brief but tender caress with your beautiful index finger. Unlike with all my other women prior, with you I didn’t have to fantasize or concentrate in order to warm my loins. With you, it happened automatically and naturally, without any forcing whatsoever. It was as though my body had been waiting for you to unlock its deep vaults of intimate passion, that had been filling up for years.

I’d been waiting so long for someone like you.  But by the time you came along, I feared that I had no passion left to offer any woman and was also frustrated that I couldn’t find someone who could please me this way. But oh my!  You sure proved me wrong. My body responded to you as a thirsty cactus does to water. It drank you in, loving the sensations, and never quite getting enough. I was convinced that there would always be more pleasure to be had and to give to you too.

I don’t know exactly what it was about you that revved up my romantic interest so. But I do know that that love lust resulted from the confluence of many factors that both you and I brought to the table. It was much more than just your body, and it wasn’t just me. It was you too, though not just you, and not just me. It was the circumstance of our lives at that time; how each of us was raised, the values with which we’ve been instilled, our particular experiences, and so on.

My fever of love was not a desire I chose to have. Never do I decide on the sorts of women who excite me. Those ladies, whoever they are, just do, perhaps due to natural selection or some other big forces that dwarf my puny will. As I see it, we don’t voluntarily decide when and where or for whom our bells of love lust ring. Put simply: We don’t control who turns us on. That’s determined by many forces beyond our control at very young ages; probably before we’re born or even conceived in fact.

You caught me looking then, and threw back a big smile. Then you returned to the meal without a word. I wanted to kiss you and to thank you for being my dream girl. I wanted to compliment you too on your charms, and I figured that some of this feeling, but not all of it mind you, came from how physically fit and trim you were. I was so glad that keeping yourself healthy was very important to you and admired your ability to do it well.

In our phone talks, you revealed that you spent many hours each day exercising and dancing, and believe me, that work paid off for you. Though in your mid-forties and now an ex-ballerina, you still looked great; just as good as you did a decade earlier in those pictures you’d shown me the previous night, of you twirling and dancing joyfully around the stages of the most exclusive theaters in Pittsburgh. I revered your discipline that allowed you to stay as thin at 47 as you were when you were 17. So as you cooked on, I walked over to and stood at your back, putting my hands under your arms and around your waist to cup your flat stomach. Then I said, “You’ll never know how glad I am that you’re thin.”

You then grew angry. That one comment would throw up a wall between us that never came down again. “What do you mean?” you snapped, clasping each of my wrists in your hands and throwing them away from your ribs. “You know,” you argued, “I used to be just like you. I hated fat people, and always avoided them. But I’ve learned! I’ve learned that they can’t help the way they are, and that it’s wrong for people like us to hold their weight against them. But you don’t care that they’re human beings. It seems like all you care about is a woman’s body.  If she happens to be too fat, then you ignore the person inside and just throw her away. But they have feelings too I tell you. Don’t their minds and hearts mean anything to you? How can you be so cruel? That’s mean and crazy, and you really ought to grow up!”

I was so shocked and dismayed at the abruptness and degree of your hostility that I said nothing back. I just walked into the living room without another word, and we didn’t speak of this again for the remaining two days of my visit. But oh, how cold and distant we became. You stopped sleeping with me that very night.  Instead you chose the couch in the living room. You gave short yes-no answers whenever I’d ask you anything. The morning you drove me to the train, you were cordial but I knew that once we said good-bye and you kissed me on the cheek, that I’d never hear from you again. I haven’t either. Not even to this day in 2009.

When I got home that afternoon, I called you only to get your voice mail. I left several messages during the following week, inviting you to call me back. But you never did. I sent you email too, but to no avail. You totally ignored me and I had no way to discuss it with you.I was crushed.

For months afterward, I frequently awoke in tears. What we had seemed so right. So how could it have turned out so wrong? Losing you profoundly saddened me. What’s more, you allowed me no say, preventing any way for me to explain what I meant when I said that I was thankful that you were so thin. But I want you to know. So I’ll write it here and maybe someday you’ll find it. Maybe someday, you’ll understand. Maybe someday you’ll call me again. Maybe someday we could be friends. Maybe, maybe, maybe,… Maybe not. But I hope you’ll at least read the rest of this, even if you do nothing more.

First off, I do not hate fat people. I maintain good friendships with lots of them, and I’ve worked productively with many more. I enjoy their company, value their opinions, and respect their judgments. I also empathize with their difficulties in losing weight because I’ve struggled myself to get thin. So I understand that trimming down and then keeping the pounds off is hard. It’s a never-ending battle, to be sure.

But I believe nonetheless, that permanent weight loss can be done. In fact, it has been done by millions. So I disagree with your claim that the heavy cannot help that they’re heavy. While a small percentage of them do have medical problems that prevent them from losing weight, this is not true for the vast majority; as proved by the masses who manage to lose weight all the time.

I care about these humans. Perhaps you didn’t know that before you came along, I dated mostly the heavy. So you don’t have to convince me that there are some heavy, yet very wonderful people out there, who’d give everything to please their lovers. I dated several such women and those relationships lasted the longest of all; at least until I met my current girlfriend. These women were very caring, understanding, and thoughtful. I could not leave them for months sometimes, because I couldn’t bare the thought of jilting them. Believe me, I cared deeply about them.

I knew that losing weight was a life challenge for them and felt mighty sorry too because of it. But I also realized that I couldn’t be the superman who would save them; who would carry them away from a life of solitude, brought on because others avoided them for being so big. I wanted to be the hero though. I wanted to be the bigger man, and I cried for many an hour, once I understood that I couldn’t.

Why couldn’t I? Because my strongest, most profound desire beyond good food, clothing, and a warm and quiet place to live, has always been to enjoy lots of erotic quality time with beautiful women. Mine is a thirst that only women like you can quench. But for whatever reason, I just don’t feel erotic when lying with heavy women.

Before you, I struggled in vane to “scale down” my vision of my ideal woman many times; but never succeeded. Indeed, I wanted to somehow learn to love the fat ladies. After all, there were so many more of those types around than the skinny ones, and usually whenever I managed to attract someone, she was big. So, changing they type of lady my heart beats for seemed like a good idea since I was way more likely to attract a fat lady than a thin one.

I longed to learn how to actually get off on the weighty. I prayed to God and the devil too, to make me lust for them. I spent hundreds of hours meditating; trying to convince myself that I physically enjoyed the so-called big and beautiful just as much as the petite and trim. I dated heavy women lots of times besides, though truth be told, I found the encounters unfulfilling. In the worst cases, they disgusted me. So after five or six failed attempts at dating the heavy and close to two years in therapy, I realized that I can’t help that I want certain things in certain ways. I can’t help who I desire, and so, I can’t change who I desire, and I desired you in a big way.

So please don’t blame me for wanting you but avoiding the heavy people. I am a good man, and my aversion to fat ladies comes not from prejudice or shallow thinking or an unwillingness to get to know them.  Instead, it comes from years of failed efforts to see them more favorably. I can’t help that I found you irresistible but not them.  So it’s strange that you would hold this biological nature of mine against me. Well, I hope you understand me better now and that you realize that my desire for you was a valuable thing that you discarded without taking the time to understand it.

So how would you have me handle this? Should I have continued dating the heavy while passing up chances to spend time with the tall and thin ladies that I so dreamed of? I couldn’t do that with sincerity, and if that makes me an uncaring person in your eyes, then I’ll just have to live with that judgment, because I cannot change. I know I cannot change because I’ve tried relentlessly for years to change.  But at least, through all that effort, I deeply understand now that I can no longer lay with the Rubenesque while my heart longs for the slender.  I will not do that to either myself or them.

Sure. I care that they’re human beings. I care about them a lot, as human beings. But I can no longer forego my dreams by staying with them, while they fulfill theirs by being with me.

Yes, it’s a sad thing that so many guys pass by the pleasantly plump and that as a result, these women are often left alone. But that’s not my problem, for I cannot solve it unless I deny my own needs. Now honestly: Do you really think that a man should give up his dreams in order to make a woman happy that he does not desire? I do not, and if you do, then you’re coo coo.

Besides, even if I withhold from them what they want, others will still love them. Lots of guys adore frumpy females, and I’d be doing a disservice to them by clinging to one despite my true feelings against that. I’d be keeping a lady that I really don’t desire, from men who do want her. That seems wrong. Just because I reject her, doesn’t mean that she’s doomed to a life of chronic rejection from all other men. So don’t blame people like me for the loneliness and isolation often experienced by the heavy.

To me, the only way a person can ever achieve complete happiness is to know and accept his set of preferences for women unconditionally, and then spend his time seeking to fulfill them as they are. He’s merely spinning his wheels if he wastes valuable time trying to change what he wants.  Experience shows that such efforts in inner self makeover are doomed to fail, and result in lower self esteem and much frustration and profound deprivation. We really can’t easily change what we truly desire.  All we can do is either act to satisfy it or act to repress it, and I choose to go for it rather than deny it.

But instead of going after what we really want, we often second-guess our desires when we believe that they can be changed.  Then we never get around to actually fulfilling them. We question whether they are morally straight or unselfish enough to pursue. The result is that we end up going without what we want because we think it lame or immoral. Thus, we’re left perpetually unsure of ourselves and sadly, unfulfilled to boot. So it makes little sense to think of me as shallow or selfish, for I am what I am, and I want what I want. I can’t change that, and if you thought about this at any length, you’d probably discover that you can’t change your desires either.  Therefore, was it not wrong of you to fault me because I cannot change mine?

When we met, I knew what I wanted, and accepted that as unchangeable as my fingerprints. Whatever made you the goddess I saw working the stove that day, though I didn’t fully understand it, I cherished it. I was so thankful to have stumbled across our situation, where everything aligned perfectly. I was thankful for you. For the first time ever, I had this strong sense that I’d found a relationship that was as good as they get; I felt that I would never find another one better than ours. Even if ours would have gotten tough at times (which it didn’t), I would have stayed with it because I had this strong idea that no relationship would ever be better.

Now I understand why people hold on to what, to the outside word, looks like a doomed love affair. Perhaps they feel about their lovers as I felt about you; that no other person could make them feel as wonderful. The good times, if they’re really good, make it possible to weather the bad. We had good times like those, you and I, and if you hadn’t so completely cut me off, I would to this day, still love you.  I’m sure.

You mentioned their minds. You seemed to be saying that while we might not be able to pleasure ourselves from a person’s outsides, then we should be able to do so with what’s on the inside. But I wonder: Does it really make sense to split humans apart in this way? Mind Vs. body, physical appearance Vs. personality, Inner beauty Vs. outer beauty, and body Vs. soul. I don’t think so.

Perhaps you were upset because you thought I was placing too much value on your body and not enough on your mind. This idea is wrong because it’s not true that people who express interest in a person’s physical attributes have no regard for the person’s mind. I say that they can’t help but regard the mind since it’s the mind that animates an otherwise lifeless body. A body can’t very well be sexy without a mind controlling it in sexy ways. The mind and the body are fused into one in such extensive and broad-sweeping ways that it’s impossible to tell where the body ends and the mind begins when discussing sexual attraction. The ways in which the mind controls the body, along with the body’s shape work together to make the body sexy. You can’t have sexy without both of these working in harmony. So even when someone says that they like your sexy legs, they’re in fact saying so much more. Not only are they complimenting you on the shape of your legs, but they’re also admiring how you move them when you walk, or cross them when you sit down, and so on. They’re admiring your mind as well, just as I was admiring yours when I complimented you on your thinness. Again, I’m sorry you didn’t see my point of view more clearly. I would have gladly explained it to you if you hadn’t severed communications with me so abruptly and so completely.

If your anger at me stemmed from your pity for the heavy, then I think you underestimate how attractive some guys find them. Not everyone thinks them ugly. What about you? Do you think they’re ugly? Do you think you need to defend them because you seem them as ugly? Is this why you rose to their defense with such intensity and sharpness when I commented on how thankful I was that you were thin? If so, then perhaps you’re shallower than I. You did say that you were like me once. Perhaps you still are. The fact is that people’s tastes are not universal. Though admittedly, many prefer a healthy and thin mate, many choose the chubby. Some enjoy the pleasantly plump, and they worry about crushing someone who has too little meat on her bones. There are lots of married heavy folks. So they do a better job at mating than you give them credit for. Perhaps?

In light of the above, why do people expect others to love with a blind eye toward a person’s physical attributes? Do you expect this? Is this why you snapped at me, because I do not love with this blind eye? You know, it’s been said that you can tell a great deal about a person just from one drop of his blood. So if that’s true, then would not his appearance tell us so much more? After all, there’s much more of it than that drop of blood. At a glance we can deduce his general health and make some pretty good guesses about his life style and preferences. By listening to his cough, we’d know if he smokes or not, or has some lung disease that perhaps we should avoid. By smelling his scent over time, we can tell if he values cleanliness or if he is taking some medicines that alter his scent. A foul odor generally means poor health or at least, poor health practices on his part. By listening to his speech, we can learn much about his education level and the culture in which he was raised. By observing how heavy he is, we can figure out how much he likes to eat and what sorts of food. From his weight, we can also predict how healthy he’ll likely be in the future and how much he values good health besides. You’d agree I think, that a relationship with someone who does not value good health as we do would be difficult. So I say that with all this data, we can make wiser choices about whether this person would be a good mate. By paying attention to this data, we can avoid lots of wasted time by steering clear of relationships that would not be (could not be) what we want. Sometimes, you don’t need to actually get into a relationship with some to know that it would be bad if you did. I’ve learned over the years that relationships with the heavy don’t make me happy. So I hope you’ll forgive me when I turn away from them these days, without even giving them a try.

We don’t control who turns us on. Do you think I do, and because of this, do you think I can decide to be attracted to the heavy? Let me assure you. I don’t, and I can’t. Since I can’t control this, you’re wrong to judge me harshly for it. It was wrong of you to end our relationship without as little a single discussion. The reality is: What turns us on is a complex convergence of hundreds or thousands of variables that involve ourselves, our lovers, the genetics and upbringings of each, and the circumstances surrounding them. Perhaps a small number of these variables we control. But most we do not. Further, it’s usually not just one of these variables that makes us desire or not. This is why desire is so hard to manipulate. You’ve either got it by default or you don’t, and not all the makeup, hair color, fancy clothes, or perfume in the world will change that.

You had it with me and you didn’t have to try at all.

You know if I thought about you enough right now, I could bring a tear to my eye. Your sudden departure five years ago left a wound in my psyche that has not yet healed. Oh I don’t think of you very often. But when I do, there are still some strong emotions there and I always wish that things had worked out better. But I don’t regret complimenting you on your thinness; I’d do it over the exact same way. What I’d do differently though, would be to talk more to you before you sent me home. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the wherewithal back then to say what I’ve said in this letter. Let me ask you: Would this have made any difference? It seemed like you had made up your mind and that no amount of talking would have changed it.

Does it change anything now? I shouldn’t ask that because if you showed up in my life again tomorrow, I’m not in a position to respond to you. I have a wonderful girlfriend. [Emmy] never bolted on me and she always takes the time to listen to me. You didn’t do that. You handled the situation poorly and because you were so reckless with my heart, I don’t think I could ever fall in love with you again. Still though, when I look at the pictures you gave me, I wonder at what could have been, and regret that we didn’t get further than we did.

Well, thanks for listening. I needed to get this out. I hope that you’re doing well and that you’re not given to the sorts of too-quick reactions these days that drove us apart back then. I’ll just have faith that the experience grew you as well as it did me. Do take care and perhaps in the next life, we can try it again.

With love,
Tom Hesley

 

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 12:40 am and is filed under Acceptance, Aloneness, Attraction, Ballerina, Beauty, Concepts, Emmy, Giving Rejection, Jilt, Letters, Loneliness, Lust, Obesity, Physical Attraction, Pity, Receiving Rejection, Rejection, Self Esteem, Shallowness, Special Ladies, Therapy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.