The Financial Dynamics Involved in Dating as a Fat Woman

Image Credit: @@pierre_rutz 

Being a plus-size woman is a journey through different kinds of exploitative and degrading things. Fat women have always been forced to negotiate their existence. This stretches to the financial facet of the dating landscape. Heterosexual dating concerns itself with highly gender-stereotyped dynamics where men are able to express their historical domination of financial resources by being “providers”. With the recent culture of the “baby girl lifestyle”, which places a spotlight on the good things of life that women ought to enjoy both in and outside a relationship, women are prioritising enjoyment, but fat women are still exempted from this culture on the basis of their size. Centuries of typecasting fat women as undeserving of being cared for have snatched from them spaces where they can be treated gently, pampered or “babied”. A few fat women share the things that they have experienced while navigating romantic relationships.

Mimi

I’ve only ever been in two relationships. In my first one, he had this cringe habit of calling me “mama” or “‘mami”. I was super uncomfortable with those terms because I had PTSD from random men making it a habit of calling me “mama” due to my weight. I spoke to a few friends about it and they said it was not a big deal and that “mami” was the female equivalent of “papi”, which according to them, was hot. At some point, he took the “mama” thing beyond “endearments” and started expecting me to, infact, mother him. He treated me more like a sugar mummy who catered to all his needs. I’d see my friends’ partners doing things for them like taking them out on trips abroad, paying their rent, etc. I’d ask my own partner for basic gestures like hair or nail appointments and he would scoff in a really derogatory manner or say things like “big woman/mummy like you”. It was extremely upsetting because he could afford to do these things for me but chose not to because he thought my weight did not offer me up to be “pampered”. We broke up after he cheated on me and it’s a bit of a struggle to allow myself to enjoy the things my current partner does for me. This one gives me the full baby girl treatment. He loves taking me out on dates which is a welcome change from men wanting me to stay cooped up in the house with them all the time.

Temilayo

When I was in secondary school, I used to have a crush on a boy. He was one of the “mean boys” in school that year. Anyways, I found myself in a toxic relationship with him. Typically, he never liked to be seen in public with me and he insisted that the relationship be kept a secret so as not to taint his rep. However, the worst part of it was that he wanted me to always buy him stuff. I had no issues with gifting him or being financially there for him as my high school self could at that time, but what rubbed me off the wrong way was that he would never reciprocate. It seemed as though it was my obligation to buy him things. The relationship was not a safe space for me to advocate my needs so I kept suffering in silence until one day when he implied that it was really my duty and obligation to cater to him financially because it was his compensation for dating me, a fat girl. The worst part is that even though I felt hurt, I believed him.

Kevwe

I am the first daughter of a family of seven so I can say that in all the relationships that I’ve been in, I was the “provider”. Taking care of my parents and younger siblings is my responsibility and it’s a very daunting one. So I see why I didn’t easily realise how unbalanced the scales were in my romantic and sexual relationships. I’d like to think that it is because I keep meeting hobos or I’m just unlucky, but I’m quite certain that it is because of the ways that previous partners have perceived my body. They believed that a bigger body translated to a larger shoulder to dump their emotional and financial needs on. Having a man treat you as fragile and soft is a feeling I’m very unfamiliar with, but one that I craved for so long. Plus all the men that I’ve been with subscribe heavily to the sort of heteromasculinity that insisted that while they may genuinely like me and my body, they couldn’t handle the strike to their ego, the “shame” that would definitely come from being with me.

Daniella

Before the 2020 lockdown, I was talking to this person that I thought was romantically interested in me. When the lockdown was declared, he explained that he was stranded in Abuja, had nowhere to stay, and would appreciate it if I accommodated him for a “short while”. I was getting warning signals, but I was also intensely attracted to him and I thought, “it’s just two weeks”. He was really kind and he made me believe that he loved me. He stayed longer than two weeks because the lockdown kept getting extended and we eventually got into an official relationship. The relationship lasted for about one year and two months. During that time, he would shuffle between Lagos and Abuja. Many times, I would suggest going to see him in Lagos but he kept postponing. Anyways, I later found out that he was hustling a business in Abuja and was basically using me for free housing. Funnily, we never had sex, never went out together, I never met any of his friends. It was like my whole existence culminated into the benefits of accommodation and he didn’t want to see anything we had beyond that.