Eating disorders stir obvious themes: food and body image. Speaking on the issue, you’ll hear a lot on rehabilitation, weight loss, therapy, but in all the rhetoric, there isn’t much spoken on relationships. More specifically, love.
Before I moved to Paris, I showed little interest in having a romantic relationship. Kissing weirded me out. The thought of a man’s arm wrapped around my frame felt appalling. When I was forced to speak to anyone–my parents, my therapist, or my friends–on vulnerable topics, I’d glue my gaze to the floor. The eyes represented windows to the truth, and I didn’t want anyone to see what I felt. I hated myself. Everything about me felt disgusting. And biologically speaking without a period my interest in sex was nonexistent.
In Paris, N didn’t let me shy away from my feelings and he encouraged me to face them. But there was more to why I allowed N to bring it out of me. N was dating my friend, N could not be my boyfriend, therefore there was no real threat to a relationship with him. He and I were a potential and even more so, together we were a secret. And I understand better now, how much eating disorders encourage secrecy.
I never molded myself to make him like me. I wasn’t going on dates with him putting on a show. I was the friend at the bar, picking at her skin beneath her shirt, considerate of the things she put in her mouth, and the questionable virgin who would go home alone to her cat. I didn’t dress up, I didn’t know how to do my make-up and hair. I was the rawest version of myself when he met me and he liked her.
During my late teens and early 20s, I moved every 6 months, which encouraged my desire to be alone. I didn’t flirt. I kept my circle small and would choose to hang out with people who recognized me as their comfortable third wheel. On a few occasions, when I debated my interest in someone and I found myself alone with them in a room, I would make note, “I’m a virgin.” I never heard from them again.
There was a joke I’d started when I was 20, “the first guy I fall for,” I told my friends, “Is the first guy that doesn’t let me run away.”
That man lived in Paris.
Dating has become as much of an interview as it is falling for the idea of something. But intimacy is not performance. And I think, what we all hope to find is greater honesty for who we are, who they are and who we are together. You know when something is right, when you don’t have to fake it, when you don’t feel paralyzed by your position and you can follow that unnameable feeling. That doesn’t mean it lasts forever, but at some point, it did exist.
I resisted the idea that I could possibly like this person as it was the noble choice. But in the end, I also chose to face the thing that scared me. I allowed myself to accept that I, too, had feelings for him, which was wrongfully encouraged by my disease. No one was watching me explore this side of myself, I didn’t have to argue my choices, or defend my actions. It felt freeing to take society out of dating, to move through it like a personal diary, where all my blind choices remained in my power. But that freedom was temporary and as time went on, the relationship I was forming felt more like the burgers I’d hidden in my closet at 15 than the diary that nurtured my voice.
This piece is not to argue in favor of my actions. It wasn’t right. But the experience was a valuable lesson. I emerged from this relationship heartbroken. I wanted love, but I also knew that to remain a secret would continue to enable my disorder.
I spent the entire 12 hour flight home, crying over three boxes of tissues. It took me a year to move on and accept how much I was starving–not for food–but for love. What we don’t talk enough about in the context of an eating disorder is how they starve more than nutrition. Family, culture, love, an eating disorder is a master manipulator that can present the worst decisions under the best light.