I think most of the time, getting healthy and looking better is a positive thing for a relationship, but, yes, sometimes "love" goes away. It happened to me.
I didn't realize how attracted my boyfriend was to my body. I knew our relationship was highly sexualized, but didn't realize my DD breasts were really the lynch pin it hung on. He was quiet and I know he didn't want to discourage me, but at the same time, he didn't want to be with a skinny woman. I was actually in denial. Near the end of my weight loss he started dating someone else, but I had already decided I was going to be open to that. I figured if I was Number One, I'd always be Number One, and it didn't matter if there were others in line behind me.
Anyway, he stopped calling me, stopped coming by, emailed less, and I still didn't see it. We never formally broke up. He just disappeared. Eventually he told me, in a roundabout way, that it was because I had become unattractive to him, and specifically, he missed the DDs that had dropped to D-cups. There's just no pleasing some people, especially if they have a type and a weak, entitled character with an ego that cannot be buffed up enough.
If we had been married, I think there would have been a lot more discussion. I think he saw the fact that we weren't married as an exit door.
I don't think this happens very often, but if you're anxious about it, discuss it. I don't know if you can turn him away from stupid, immature physical ideals, even though you're both going to get old and wrinkled and flabby as you age, in most cases. If I had it to do over again, I would have tried to protect myself and prepare for the possibility that I had misjudged the level of commitment he felt for me.
After I lost the weight, I lost him, and I started getting a lot of attention and dating a lot. But as it turned out, those attentions were just as unsatisfying as the disappointment he had shown me.
It's been 15 years and I can tell you, I couldn't care less about him anymore. It took a long time to get there, and it wasn't like I got a replacement man to take his place. Instead, my life became super-active and when I walked by a mirror or my reflection in a store window, my subconscious went WOW, you look fantastic. The dynamic of that helped me to look at other aspects of my life and I became productive as a writer, and artist, a musician and all my other buried talents, including cooking and baking.
In retrospect, I see that this kind of judgment had been haunting me since my teens. Boys always wanted me for my body and if I wasn't getting wolf-whistles as cars passed by or when I was in a store or at a party, I felt deficient.
No more. I'm happy with my body in my 70s but mostly because I have no health problems, while others around me are in and out of hospitals or loaded up on prescription drugs. In the last two months, five of my peers have died. But I'm alive and waiting for the hiking season to begin so I can go out and hike the mountains of the North Cascades. I eat anything I want, but my diet is balanced and I feel great.
Feeling good without a man in my life is a thousand times better than feeling like an inadequate failure with a man who thinks I don't measure up. In fact, it was only by losing a man I thought I loved eternally freed me from stupid, worshipful, second-class-citizen low self-esteem.
If I ever have a man again, he has to match me and my inner standards, whether he thinks I'm gorgeous or just okay. But having raised my son alone, who's now 42, has cured me of the obsession of finding a mate. I'm much better off.
I'm free.
You might not be able to accept it if your mate finds you less attractive. But I urge you to spend as much time as possible noticing your own fine qualities, and sharing them with others. The less time you pay caring about what he thinks, the more time you have to help the homeless, volunteer at civic organizations, reach out to suffering friends, being an ear for someone else on the crisis line and LAUGHING at the simply joyous moments of the hummingbird outside your window or the brilliant yellow dandelions littering your lawn.
We have a Warm Line here in Seattle. I can call if I need to and talk to a peer who's been challenged as I have. The listener may be struggling with weight but s/he's reaching out to offer help to others who are struggling with daily activities. Turn away from the negatives. Turn them into positives. If your mate isn't attracted to someone who can do that, please realize, you deserve someone better.
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