Where Charlotte grew up, everybody was having sex at 12 and 13. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true. Or, everybody could have been lying. Charlotte didn’t have sex until she was 17½, which made her a virtual senior citizen, relatively speaking. By age 15, it was probably close to true that everyone (except Charlotte) had done it. She comes from an area predominantly Latin and Mormon. Once the girls from Latin America had their Quinceañera—the 15th birthday and transition from childhood to womanhood—everybody had sex. That doesn’t explain the Mormons. But apparently religion, whether under the watchful eye of Jesus or Joseph Smith, couldn’t protect their purity until marriage. Imagine that.
Charlotte may have been a late bloomer, but that was in the beginning. It’s been full steam ahead ever since. Her first time was “accidental.” You know how that accidental sex goes. “But after that it wasn’t such a BFD. I couldn’t believe that’s what I was waiting for.” Fortunately, she soon found people who showed her—and then some more people, and some more. She has never had any problem getting laid, and she has been fat nearly her entire life. That’s not to say she was always comfortable about being fat and having sex, but not so much that it slowed her down, once she got started.
She got married early—and often. The first time was the day she turned 20. She was 5’1” and he was 6’8”, which is incidental, but pretty entertaining to think about. They had a satisfying sex life, but, she says, pretty vanilla. Still, she liked the guy, so intermediate-level foreplay and missionary were all right, for as long as the marriage lasted, which was about five minutes, give or take. They soon realized they had each married the person who happened to be there and moved onto less vanilla pastures—at least she did. A decade ago, Charlotte stopped counting the number of partners she’d had. At that time it was either 34 or 35.
Since the fifth grade, Charlotte has been overweight. When she lost her virginity, she was very big, at least by the standards of high school. Although she was not happy about her weight, it didn’t prevent her from having boyfriends, or sex. But those boyfriends and sex didn’t prevent her classmates from commenting in the hallway. She had a big ass and they didn’t forget to let her know. Yet the negative body-image messages and her own feelings didn’t inhibit her drive or capacity to get boys, and not just in bed. These weren’t liaisons where the guys just wanted to do the fat chick in secret. They liked her. Publicly. Still, she wasn’t altogether unaffected.
Up until her mid-twenties, Charlotte was very passive about the whole sex thing; she was never the aggressor. Sex was something that happened to her. Someone would choose to have sex with her, and she would go along for the ride. Making the first move, or virtually any move, was subjecting herself to rejection which had to be based on looks. And that was intolerable.
The hostile messages about fat bodies were pervasive since she was young. These, to some extent, came from her peers, but mostly the messenger was her brother. He was an athlete—a six-percent-body-fat kind of guy. He would say things to Charlotte, like, “Don’t be a fat girl, because you are going to have to beg for friends.” Or, “Nobody wants to hang out with the fat chick.” And, “You’re going to have to be the ugly sidekick.” He learned his critical ways from watching their father harangue their mother about the size of her derriere. “Everybody in my family has a big ass. It’s the family ass.”
Charlotte was never put on diets, but there were plenty of passive-aggressive remarks to motivate her. “Are you really sure you want to eat French fries?” That was her mom. Her dad became more direct as she got older, supportively suggesting: “Don’t be such a cow.” Charlotte began putting herself on diets at around age 12. In junior high, she couldn’t shake off the judgment, plus her peers were all obsessed with their own size as well. She would do things like live on canned green beans for a week, but the fan favorite was the Pepsi and cigarette diet. She got really skinny on Pepsi and cigarettes—that’s the way the models do it.
When she got married, she stopped dieting because she didn’t feel that pressure to “be attractive” anymore. “I was off the hook, which is probably the opposite of the truth, but I didn’t worry about it.” In her first year of marriage she gained 50 pounds. Since the marriage only lasted a year, she soon felt pressure to be attractive again, and fast. Back to dieting like the stars do it, and this time she added dangerous amounts of exercise.
By this time, her parents had split, and the newly single Charlotte moved in with her dad. Fat and incredibly lonely, she had a one-night stand, “because in that frame of mind I thought it was an excellent idea.” It was the worst sexual experience she has ever had. “Not because the sex was bad, because it was pretty good; but because I was so disgusted with myself for choosing that way to feel better. It had the exact opposite effect.” Charlotte was not a prude and a one-night stand is not something she finds morally or even personally reprehensible. It was disturbing because she did it in response to inadequacy, or more accurately, feelings of inadequacy. Her father’s new wife and children were perfect specimens, thin and blond, exactly what Charlotte was not, though exactly what she imagined would make her a successful person and partner.
When she gained weight during her first marriage, she did it under an unspoken pact. There seemed to be a bargain that if both people gained weight at the same time and same rate, it was tolerable. She and her husband gained weight together, and as partners in crime, no one was punished—at least not by the other person.
In her new home, she had no friends. She didn’t know a soul except the people at work, and there, other than some women nearing retirement, everyone was thin and good-looking. It was tough to walk into work each day and be the fat person. But by happenstance she met a man on a street corner, and this man was handsome. He was the first person she had dated who was on a “different level” than she. He had blue eyes and sandy brown hair, an angular jaw and fit body. They moved in together and were married within ten months. He was a very good-looking person, and Charlotte was still a fat person. It was always a sticking point for her and could be the reason the relationship ultimately failed. That, and he cheated.
It’s not clear if her fat was a sticking point for him. He never openly complained, but he would moon over thin people. He wouldn’t say “lose weight,” but he didn’t watch fat porn or mention large hotties, either. When he complimented her, it was on her pretty face or her long hair, never her body—he never said he liked her ass, her legs, or her waist. Does any of that mean he didn’t find Charlotte attractive? No, but she worried about it anyway; she didn’t find herself attractive. The head-shrinker types call that projection. She neglected to remember this was someone she met on a street corner, who could have kept on walking.
Every relationship she’d had up until that point started with her being merely acceptable to date; her body kept her from being marriage material. After they got to know her personality, her fat would become tolerable to overlook. At least that’s her impression. But the fact is the longest stretch Charlotte was single was between her first two husbands, which wasn’t much of a stretch at all. To this day, it is still the longest time she was ever without a boyfriend. Now 39, she has been a serial monogamist.
How does she account for all this male attention despite her fatness? “I was funny. If you were a fat girl you had to be funny, or you had to be smart, or quick-witted. That was the costume you had to wear, the penance you had to pay for being fat. You could be a real bitch if you were attractive.” Charlotte acknowledges that she might have been more attractive, objectively, than she viewed herself. Although she always felt fat and unattractive, there was always someone who wanted her. In addition to being funny, smart, and quick-witted, Charlotte was kind and helpful. “Boys who liked me wanted someone like their mom. I was always obliging in some way. If you forgot something I would go and get it. If you hadn’t had a meal I would cook it. I was always Johnny-on-the-spot with kindness, helpfulness, understanding, and concern.” Boys do like that. “I had moments when I was a bitch, but my default personality was always ‘how can I help you?’” That does sound attractive.
After Charlotte got married the second time, he joined the military and they moved overseas. It was in Europe that she realized she was a non-monogamous person. She didn’t yet have a name for it, couldn’t quite wrap her brain around it, and definitely wasn’t ready intellectually for the concept. But the instinct was clear.
You get around military and something you learn very quickly is that there is a lot of cheating. It’s a universal expectation. There are two types of wives—wives who cheat and wives who don’t. It’s actually everyone who cheats, the wives and the husbands, but that was a saying often used that bespoke what was going on.
She imagines there were plenty of people living traditional monogamous lives, but that wasn’t the case for most she knew. It definitely wasn’t the case for her, and it wasn’t the case for her husband. He had already been with someone else before she even got there.
She wasn’t entirely sure he had cheated, initially, so she just pretended it didn’t happen. It was a very different culture in Europe.
Where I was, the local people didn’t give a shit who slept with who, or where. There was a lot of sexual freedom and many in the military would get there and not be able to handle all that freedom, at least not responsibly. It was total debauchery—drugs, sex, and everything you can think of that is taboo in the United States.
Over the course of the five years she lived there, she had around 10 partners. Whether that is a lot is subjective. What’s not subjective is that she was married the entire time. “That’s when I learned non-monogamy worked better for me. I didn’t have a name for it, in part because it was all shady. It wasn’t discussed.” At the time, hiding her activities was part of the excitement.
Charlotte would quickly get bored with a partner or would need more attention than one person could give her. That’s largely why she was a serial monogamist before—she could never seem to get enough affection from anyone. She doesn’t know the genesis; just that she needs more variety. She found that variety in the anything-goes culture of the military overseas. It worked for her; it seemed to work for her husband as well, since he was doing it too. It wasn’t out in the open—they seemingly hid it from each other. But everybody knew, though nobody talked about it.
Not all of her partners in those five years were men. This is also when she found out she liked girls. As a teenage babysitter, she had access to the “fantastic and voluminous collection of skin magazines” belonging to her neighbor. The attraction was clear. Her first experience with a woman was in the context of, essentially, partner swapping. It was common for the military spouses to have sex parties. She only attended one. “I have discovered that I don’t enjoy group sex. The whole time I am thinking about what I look like in this or that position, or who’s judging my technique.” Whether that was actually on people’s minds is questionable, but perception is reality. Anyhow, that was where she had her first experience with a woman. The woman was great; the environment was horrible.
It’s not that everyone was having sex parties, but anything you could think of was taking place by some group or another. These events were cross-continental—including both American military and some Europeans. It was common for the single men to have European girlfriends and continue to hang around the married housing with their friends. So the married service members’ compound would be the spot for hookups and sex parties. It was pragmatic— married military had bigger houses. Though partner swapping was common, it was all heterosexual or women with women, as far as Charlotte knew. She never saw gay male sex. However, there were three-ways. “It’s not gay if it’s a three-way.” Of course there were gay men in the army, but they had to be very careful. “It’s a vicious ugly world for anyone who is gay in the military.”
Charlotte was a woman and a military wife, not a soldier, so it was acceptable for her to “experiment” with other women. And she did—then, and later.
In my mind, and in practicality, sex with women and men is worlds apart. If you’re having sex with a dude, you’re fucking. If you’re having sex with a lady you might be making love. With a woman, it’s just softer, sweeter, more patient, and less about getting to the goal. Sex with guys is more animal, it’s more raw.
Now, nearing age 40, she has found that men change, at least some men do. Sex with her current boyfriend is “very sweet, very much how I think of sex with girls, only with dick.” Charlotte has a current boyfriend, as well as a current husband—who would be her third.
For Charlotte, attraction has always been about the whole person—not appearance, or gender, and not even necessarily personality—it’s a package. Charlotte is generous in the way she finds attractiveness in others. She is not nearly so generous with herself. Not particularly ironically, she likes to say “denial and repression are two very effective tools; do not throw them out of your kit.” That is how she would get past some of the discomfort with her body, being as sexually prolific as she was. But it’s not a fail-safe. “When I was having sex with guys, I would think about all of my wobbly bits and that they were even wobblier at the moment. I would think about how I am less attractive if I have to move this way or do that thing.” It would provoke a lot of anxiety. Consequently, she was very passive. “I would never say ‘do this,’ or ‘don’t do that.’ There was never any command from me, and there was not a lot of communication. It was all about what he wanted.” She felt much more judged by men than by women. “I have no empirical data for that, I just felt like girls were more like me and would be less judgmental, or more kind, or maybe in the same situation thinking, ‘ just how wiggly is my ass?’”
But that was during sex. She doesn’t have a lot of women as friends—most of her friends are men. And the women friends she does have are fairly unusual. “I’m weird; it’s an acknowledged point in my mind that I am a weirdo. I am an outlier in the way that I view things.” She is certainly intellectually independent. But emotionally, the running thread has mostly been: “Please somebody love me, and find me attractive, even though I don’t deserve it because I’m fat, and fat is disgusting.”
Charlotte doesn’t project those feelings onto others; she saves it all for herself. She doesn’t find other fat people disgusting. Appearance in general, and body size in particular, are not an issue for her in attraction to others. That’s one reason she always had a boyfriend. Also, she typically picked from her pool of friends, people she already liked and who already liked her. There have been times where she turned someone down because of body size, but she views that more as a pragmatic decision. “Whether I found them attractive or not, if I said no to somebody because of their looks, it usually had to do with logistics. My ass is too big and your gut is too big and there is no way we are going to be able to have sex.”
Eventually she moved out of the married housing and got her own little place. They didn’t divorce, but they were no longer a couple.
And let me tell you, being a free, available, English-speaking girl around a post of thousands of single dudes is a pretty enviable position. You can be ugly, fat, or anything else, and it doesn’t matter. You are the cream of the crop. All the local girls are trying to get knocked up and get government assistance, and the married ones are married. I certainly had my choice of people who were very attractive, but I often went for people who were unconventional. Maybe they weren’t conventionally attractive, but I found them attractive.
Her breakup with her second husband happened when she came back to the States to care for a military friend who had cancer. Charlotte had taken a lot of people under her wing while living on base. At 25, she was one of the oldest people around. The wives were as young as 17 and already had kids. But they didn’t know how to get to the grocery store or write a check. Charlotte ended up as sort of the housemother. While Charlotte was away, she discovered her husband was having an affair. They had both been sleeping around, but this was an actual relationship, and the woman didn’t know he was married. “It really pissed me off. It wasn’t that he was fucking her; it was that he loved her. I called him up and gave him enough rope to hang himself, and he did.” He begged Charlotte to come back, and she did. That pattern went on for a while, until finally Charlotte just had enough. The military gives benefits to married soldiers and he was getting a lot of money for the marriage. They worked out a deal in which she could move out and he could collect that cash. No one had to know.
Now free and in demand, she slept with anyone and everyone she wanted. “I went on kind of a rampage.” She had two best friends—men—and they hung out, partied, did a lot of drugs, and got laid. “I was a hot commodity. I didn’t want to get married or have kids. So I had no problem getting laid, frequently. I fondly remember it, but the quality of sex was bad. I wasn’t a very good communicator because I still felt so bad about myself, and because a lot of the time everybody was drunk.” In relative terms, she felt better about her body then.
Compared to who else was available, I felt pretty good. The military wives all had a bunch of kids, stretch marks, and extra weight themselves. Then there were the ridiculously hot European girls. But I didn’t even bother to compare myself to them; they were a different league. I felt like it was a competition and I was comfortably in the middle of the pack. Still, I always had this niggling feeling that I’d rather have sex in the dark.
Charlotte wouldn’t say she was a person who regularly dieted back then, but “I was always setting myself up for some kind of failure.” She would starve herself whenever she felt especially bad about her body. When she was in Europe and very physically active, walking everywhere and taking public transportation, she was on the smaller side, for her. “Since I have an hourglass figure I was more passable as conventionally attractive, even though I was obese. Still, I would never let anyone see me naked.” Her husbands had seen her naked, but she says she remedied that with her “effective tools of denial, repression, and not thinking about it. Also I would close my eyes—because if I can’t see, obviously they can’t either.” She’s kidding, of course, but not entirely.
Her second husband did have issues with her weight and always wanted her to lose some, but not because he didn’t find her attractive. He found curvy women far more attractive, but he felt judged by his peers for having a fat wife. She doesn’t know for certain he was judged, but she would hear how the guys would talk about the other wives and assumed they said the same things about her. They would come over and drink beer, and as she cooked and served, she would listen. There was constant mocking, and a favorite subject to mock about was the wife’s fat ass. She would hear them make fun of other women whom she considered more attractive than she, and more svelte, so she could only imagine what the condemnation was like when she was the subject of ridicule.
“Military men are really terribly cruel to each other. It’s part of the culture.” Did they mean it, or was it just some kind of brutish hazing? Charlotte thinks for the most part, in their minds, it was harmless fun. Being an asshole was good entertainment. “It’s well known that at least in army culture the men like to marry women with a little more meat on their bones. Though they will fuck everyone. I saw guys go out and fuck anyone who happened to be there and later make fun of themselves.” She doesn’t know why the army men preferred to marry larger women. She just noticed that wives were thicker than girlfriends.
I had this friend, she was a very, very big woman. I don’t know what she weighed, but she was definitely a large human. But she had a lovely face and she was hilarious, and all kinds of qualifiers that allow you to be fat. She got laid so much, she got laid more than I did. And then everybody would talk about it like it was some rite of passage that they had fucked this really big girl. I would ask her: ‘How can you feel okay about this?’ She said: ‘Because I’m getting laid and that’s what I want, so I am not going to worry about it.’ She eventually married a soldier.
After Charlotte’s 18 months in Europe, screwing everyone in pants and skirts, she met a boy she really liked and moved back to the States with him. The relationship didn’t last long. It was based primarily around his “fantastic dick.” Not terribly surprisingly, it went disastrously and they moved on. During that timeframe, her divorce came through. It takes a long time to divorce someone in the military who is overseas, in case you are planning it.
Now she was in the U.S. and back on the dating scene, which was a very different experience than being hot stuff on a military base in Europe. “I hated it, I was lonely, miserable, and almost 30.” She found herself a boyfriend who was 18. “He was great, as long as he didn’t talk.” Then there was this “crazy libertarian lawyer. The sex was really really good, but the guy was really really dorky.” He was another one she preferred would refrain from speaking. It didn’t work out.
She met her current husband online. “I decided I had very bad taste and that I was failing at marriage and no good at relationships because I kept looking for the wrong things. I went to the Internet hoping someone smarter than me had figured out how to pick better.” She made the decision to select someone totally different. That’s when she met her husband, “… whom I love and think is great and plan to be married to forever.” She wasn’t initially attracted to him, though. “He had long hair and wore super big ‘birth control glasses.’ They were the largest glasses I had ever seen on a head.” He smoked and wore flannel. His pants were up too high. “And his online picture looked like a serial killer.” However, she met him and really enjoyed talking with him. Unfortunately, there was no chemistry, and she went back to fiddling around with the 18-year-old, until it began to feel ridiculous. She realized she needed an adult to date.
Charlotte decided to try a second date with the guy with the big glasses. “I don’t know what happened, maybe I changed my perspective, or he changed his clothing. But he hugged me and had this masculine smell, and all of sudden he was attractive.” Within three weeks she knew she loved him. “It scared the ever-loving shit out of me. I was twice divorced, I figured I had no business being in a relationship—I am an utter failure at this.” But he liked her back. On the third date, in an oddly proper manner while smooching on the couch, he said: “Perhaps we would be more comfortable in the bedroom.”
“I literally laughed, but I had designs on sleeping with him, so I went into the bedroom.” They had passable but not fantastic sex. They have had not-so-great sex for almost their entire eight years together—until the last six months.
I’ve always liked him more than anyone else. I’ve loved him more than anyone else. I’ve trusted him more than anyone else. But we have only had on-and-off requisite sex, quarterly, for the last eight years. He has really high anxiety and when he would get anxious, I would feel unattractive. This is a pretty ugly and horrifying part of my sex life; I have failed in every possible way to have good sex with my husband for a long time. We are so happy with each other in every other way. We had to fix our sex life.
Charlotte’s husband is not nearly as sexually “worldly” as was Charlotte and felt cheated that he never got to sow his wild oats. The sex that he did have was surrounded with bad memories and uncomfortable circumstances. Charlotte tried very hard to be understanding about this, but was still miserable about their sex life.
Her last serious relationship was with someone who had cheated and broken her heart, so although they discussed it, initially she was not open to anything related to non-monogamy. “I was afraid of what I would feel.” They started seeing a counselor to discuss their sex problems. It turned out, for one thing, Charlotte uncharacteristically had a lack of interest in sex. “Boy did I ever have a lack of interest. I couldn’t care less if sex fell off the planet.” They also dealt with the idea that her husband wanted to experience sex with other people. They had talked about it together before, but he didn’t believe her when she said it was all right. “You are not a bad person for wanting to have better experiences surrounding sex. I’m not going to leave you.” Their counselor had to prod: “Are you not hearing what Charlotte is saying to you?” And with that, they negotiated the terms of each of them being allowed to have sex with other people.
“We had always been conceptually and intellectually accepting of non-monogamy. But that was removed, now it was personal and real.” He found a girlfriend first. “I was really unprepared for how terrified I would be. I was a hot mess.” Charlotte was on board with it academically, as she has had some experience with non-monogamy, but that was non-consensual. Really, it was serial cheating.
This plan went awfully at first. “I behaved really badly, I was jealous and shitty, I put all kinds of restrictions on him—‘You can’t talk to her when I’m home and I don’t want to hear her fucking text messages.’” But as things progressed, the plan had surprising ancillary benefits. For one thing, he relaxed. “He got less anxious and for the first time we had fantastic sex. For me all of a sudden it was like a switch came back on.”
They have now negotiated a fully polyamorous relationship in which both are allowed to have sex outside of the marriage. They have a detailed agreement with concrete rules and boundaries. Charlotte has struggled with the idea that someone would replace her, that he would like someone else better, that she would be left alone—emotions she did not expect. She did not anticipate the wave of fear and self-doubt, bad self-esteem, and all the things that came along with it. But she adjusted. And she found a boyfriend.
“Halleluiah.”
For them, the definition of polyamory includes that each is permitted to have a love and sex relationship with someone else. “Not love with a big-L, love meaning loving. We do nice things for each other, we go out on dates.” Using the language of polyamory, her husband is her primary partner and her boyfriend is her secondary. Her boyfriend could have other partners as well, though at the moment he doesn’t. “Everybody in polyamory lives in a certain amount of fear that someone will take their primary away.” That person would be called a Cowboy: someone who comes along and captures your boy or girl, taking them for their own monogamous relationship. “But we have been very upfront from the start. If you are going to be involved in polyamory you had better like to talk about things, communicate, negotiate, set boundaries and clear expectations—because otherwise, it will go very, very badly.”
Charlotte and her husband have been through counseling and eight years of marriage. They communicate and negotiate, trust each other implicitly, and have all the negotiated rules. But how do they know the secondary is going to follow the system? They don’t, and that happens.
You have to be able to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, and that at any point something really shitty could happen. You have to figure out if you can balance that with the benefit you get. But I have never felt as good about myself in my entire life as I have since I started polyamory.
The first fear Charlotte had when they decided to be nonmonogamous was that her husband would find a girlfriend and no one else would want her, because she’s fat. Her husband, by the way, is fat too. But she has a belief, or at least a feeling, that it’s okay to be fat if you’re a guy—that the standards are different for a man than a woman. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s how it has always been in my mind.”
Charlotte, along with practicing polyamory, practices dieting. She is on Weight Watchers now. “Weight plays into this in a lot of ways. The first time I got naked in front of my boyfriend was terrifying. I was so anxious about having all of my jiggly bits seen by someone else. I was horrified I might be judged.” Her boyfriend, too, is a “fat dude.” “He is rotund. He could set a beer on his belly,” though he doesn’t. “I am more comfortable with a fat person, I feel like they understand me, that they have had similar experiences. And maybe it’s because I have been fat so long, but fat is more normal to me.”
All three of them—husband, boyfriend, and Charlotte—have issues with their own weight, but not with their partners’. Charlotte considers herself a lifer at Weight Watchers. She hopes to lose 10 pounds a year, for a lot of years. She has come to terms with counting points for the rest of her life. Charlotte has considered giving up dieting and accepting herself as she is. In fact, she recognizes that acceptance is probably the only rational thing to do. “It’s really the most sensible tack to take—to not diet. If you look at the data, almost no one loses weight and keeps it off. If you’re fat, you’re fat. The only way a fat person becomes average weight is through continuous and difficult-to-sustain efforts.” And she knows that is probably an understatement.
I have tried to make some changes in my thinking. I adjusted my goal weight to something more reasonable and I stopped beating myself up when I failed. I have come to a greater acceptance, if not complete acceptance. If one percent of the people on earth are attracted to fat people, that’s still a lot of people. I really try not to worry too much.
Charlotte is an enigma. She is a rational, informationand fact-driven person. Yet knowing what she knows about the odds, she continues to diet. How does she respond to that? She laughs. “It’s like believing in Santa Claus, isn’t it?”
Perhaps, but many would say the same thing about polyamory.