When you have been married for several years, the physical changes made by time over your partner can sometimes modify the desire you have for him. This is the case of Pauline, who questions sexologist and psychoanalyst Catherine Blanc in the program "Sans rendez-vous", on Europe 1, on how to approach, with her husband, the subject of her weight gain.
Pauline's question, 48
I have been married for 21 years and I deeply love my husband. However, he gained 25 kg and I no longer feel any sexual attraction because of it. How to make him understand ?
>> Find all the sex questions in replay and podcast here
Catherine Blanc's response
This poses several interesting problems. There is time passing and changing our bodies, and the difficulty of being as attractive as ever. We could stop there and simply stigmatize bodies that evolve to justify the difficulty of desire. However, it is something else that is at work when a desire fails. It also means being able to renew a relationship that is always the same, that lasts, that has found its comfort, etc. This does not cancel out the fact that we can have beauty criteria that we like more.
But here, something else is at stake: the difficulty of seeing someone whom we loved because he was carrying enthusiasm and virility, to have abandoned his own case by not taking care of him. There is indeed what we cannot fight against: wrinkles, skin that loses its tone ... It is painful if the eyes of the other stigmatize it. We have to accept it, because the beauty of a couple is to be able to age together and accept what, little by little, flees without being afraid of the desire that flees with it. But there is also what we have abandoned: our muscles, the weight we gain ...
To be able to discuss this with her husband, you have to worry about what it means for him rather than saying "since you're like this, I don't want you anymore", at the risk of starting a trench war, because , for one or the other member of the couple, the reality is that time passes.
Perhaps we must also be careful to see what is her own ambivalence: to see if she has not fed her husband while being reassured to feed him, now accusing him of having gained weight. She must be able to tell her husband that she is worried, and ask him if this weight gain is not that he has given up on pleasing himself, and tell him that she needs that he likes himself so that he likes him too, even with a few extra pounds.