Let’s sit with this for a second, because what you’re describing is something I see a lot in my office, and it’s more layered than it looks on the surface.
When someone is carrying shame about their body, about weight gain, about how they look, that shame does not stay inside them. It leaks. It leaks into the relationship in ways that can feel really confusing for both partners.
Here’s what I mean. When you feel ashamed of your body, you start to anticipate rejection before it even happens. You might pull away from physical intimacy before your partner has a chance to reject you. You might interpret a completely neutral comment from them as criticism. You might stop letting yourself be seen, literally and emotionally, because the vulnerability of being seen feels like too much risk.
And then your partner, on the other side of that wall, has no idea why you’ve gone quiet, why you’ve stopped reaching for them, why you seem to have disappeared a little bit. They may not even know about the shame. They just feel the distance.
So the relationship starts suffering from something that neither of you is fully talking about.
The shame becomes a third person in the room.
Here’s what I want you to hear. Your partner fell in love with a whole person. Not a body at a particular weight. And the cruelest thing shame does is convince you that the love was always conditional on something you can no longer deliver.
That is not the truth. That is shame talking.
The move here, and I know it is a hard one, is to let your partner in on what’s actually happening inside you. Not to ask them to fix it, not to have them reassure you with compliments. That rarely works. But to say something like, “I’ve been struggling with how I feel about myself lately, and I think it’s been making me pull away from you.”
That is the kind of vulnerability that actually rebuilds closeness.
Because here’s the thing. Closeness doesn’t grow from perfect bodies. It grows from being known. And right now, your partner doesn’t fully know where you’ve gone. Let them in.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: How Shame Destroys Relationships
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