Doing my usual scrolling and read a post that got me thinking and I am wondering what the “hive mind” would think of my theory. A HLF posted that her LL husband “felt pressured” to have sex and told her she could open their marriage. In the post she mentioned that he was still attractive to her but had put on significant weight and thought this was the main reason for him avoiding sex. This got me thinking of my own relationship and lead me to the question: for relationships that started equal and faded to the HL/LL pairing, how much does body image - weight specifically, play a factor in being LL or even LL4U?

When we started dating my wife was objectively HOT and she knew it. She wore sexy clothes, spent money on hair and makeup, never left the house without looking very put together and was borderline promiscuous in high school and her early 20’s. Our first few years together were great … then we started having children. She made a huge effort to lose the “baby weight” after the first two, bought new, sexy clothes as a reward for reaching her weight goals and reveled in attention from other men. Then the third child came along and she couldn’t loose the weight like before, we had a total of 5 and after the fourth, only made a halfhearted attempt to lose weight. Our sex life deteriorated along that same timeline. I still think she is objectively attractive and men will flirt with her, but she denies that they are, “No, they are just being nice”. She has fully taken on the “mom” look of jeans and loose sweaters or tops, still gets “ready” before going out of the house but it is not the same, she still has all the sexy clothes plastic wrapped in a wardrobe box in the garage. I don’t think she sees herself as objectively attractive. She has also said that she “feels pressured to have sex” and I wonder how much stems to her not “feeling sexy”?

Of course there is the correlation of LL4U if you don’t find your partner attractive due to their weight gain, age, change in hygiene, give-a-crap, etc., but it would be common factor in that case to: objective attractiveness.