'When a woman said my husband and I were an "interesting" couple, I knew exactly what she meant.'

I met my husband, Kevin, when I was a freshman at Duke University, and he was a rising senior. He had bright dimples and sparkling hazel eyes. We were instantly smitten, necking anytime we stopped at red lights. Young love couldn’t have been sweeter.

Everything glimmered in effervescence. The world was our oyster, and we consumed it. Little did I know society was watching exactly how many oysters I was eating…

A year into our relationship, after a group dinner, my roommate said her friend told her Kevin and I were "an interesting couple".

"How so?" I responded. Did she mean because I'm a Latina and Kevin's pasty white? I, myself, was concerned about how much sunscreen he'd have to apply in the Florida sun, but I pushed those worries away in the face of young love.

"You know, because you are bigger than him," she said bluntly.

I was so taken aback I didn't know how to respond. This was a fair assessment of the situation. Kevin was six feet tall, lean, and lanky. I had a round face and an apple body. But it was never an issue in our relationship, and it was not something I'd thought about.

Was it something Kevin thought about?

On the surface, our relationship was idyllic and magical. But maybe everything was not as it seemed. Could our relationship withstand the weight of our differences?

Kevin and Julie when they met in 1998. Photos taken by each other. Image: Supplied.

Addressing the 'elephant' in my relationship.

"Mixed weight relationship" is a label attached to couples where one half of the pair is larger than the other. The question being, why would a normal-sized body person want to be with a fatty?

As a budding political science major, I knew there were layers of discrimination people faced in their daily lives based on their sex, age, race, religion and gender.

I was at Duke learning about social injustice and inequality (it's a liberal college, after all). I knew prejudice had been used to prevent couples from marrying. As I wrote a paper on Loving v. Virginia, I thought about how only 25 years earlier, my parents could have been barred from being married in some states because my father was Hispanic and my mother was white.

Among all these important topics, being discriminated against for being with a thin man escaped me.

Shocking, I know. But with everything going on in this crazy world, I forgot to compare our waistlines when falling in love.

The comment about us being an "interesting couple" seemed insignificant, yet once the seed of self-doubt was planted, it flourished. I became acutely aware that my husband and I were being judged. 

I'd grown up seeing many "mixed-weight" couples. Everyone has seen The Flintstones and The Honeymooners.

Univision had even just released a show called El Gordo y La Flaca, which translates to The Fat Man and the Skinny Woman. Clearly, being mix-matched in body shapes wasn't so unusual that it would provoke commentary.

But as I noted in a recent article, those couples included a heavy-set man and a thin woman. The big screen rarely shows a plump woman and a smaller man.

So the real issue wasn't that one of us was bigger. It was that I was bigger! (Insert the sound of my double chin hitting the floor.)

I became extremely self-conscious. I started to notice people staring at us when out in public. Like my roommate's friend, I assumed they were silently labeling me the "elephant" in the relationship.

While my relationship made me feel secure and happy, their possible judgment made me feel insecure and sad. I look back now and realise that most of the pictures I have of Kevin and me when we first met were me standing behind him.

This is more shocking if you know me at all. I'm not one to stand behind anyone. I'm generally in front dragging the other person down the road by the hand. But this shows how at such a tender stage in our relationship, I subconsciously tried to minimise our weight difference to others.

Young love where I was hiding my body. Photos by my roommates. Image: Supplied.

Leaning into self-worth rather than self-hate.

I don't know why people care about what goes on between two consenting adults. But it's specifically not clear why people fear pudgy women. We put our pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else, admittedly sometimes from a sitting position.

My friend said historically men were the providers. Thus, if men were overweight, it meant they had money and resources. Accordingly, society didn't judge women for dating fat men because it's reasonable they were seeking security.

Fat men were entitled to thin wives. Fat women, on the other hand, were not entitled to anything and should be shoved in boxes and hidden away. (Well, if you could find boxes big enough for us.)

A controversial Forbes article by Virgie Tovar titled "Bridgerton": Are We Still Not Ready For A Mixed-Weight Romance On Screen? highlighted the divide between viewers over the on-screen relationship between Penelope, a slightly rounder woman, and Colin Bridgerton, a thinner man.

The actress who plays Penelope is not even obese. Probably not even overweight, yet some viewers thought her relationship with Colin was implausible. Dare I mention I didn't see any online chatter regarding the plausibility of Felonious Gru and Lucy Wilde from Despicable Me 4?

Why do people find plump women unworthy? More specifically, was I unworthy of my "thin" mate?

While living in NYC, I had several women (friends of friends) hit on my husband right in front of me — generally aware that I was his wife. In addition to being thinner, my husband is six foot tall, insanely smart, with a decent salary. These women didn't understand how he could be with me and tried to lure him away with their normal waistlines.

But my husband never took the bait.

The world does not want us to feel included. They want to ostracise us fatties and keep us on the periphery not deserving of love and praise.

But my husband and I didn't let others' opinions of our relationship impact our love.

I was not allowing harmful stereotypes to ruin my happiness! I clapped back. I stopped noticing the people staring and just lived my life. I'm glad I did. Fatphobia can be hard to overcome, but we did it!

Kevin and I got married at the end of college and will be celebrating our 22nd anniversary next year.

I leaned into my worth as a person, not allowing my value to be determined by my waist size. My husband also never judged my weight. Even when nine months pregnant.

Kevin values me as his equal and even gained weight to ensure we were on more equal footing. I'm sure others will blame me for turning him fat. But let the record show, when I met him he ate Chick-fil-A and a carton of cookies every day. He was only thinner than me because he had a faster metabolism. Said metabolism has now slowed to a snail's pace.

I weigh the exact same as when we first met. His BMI is probably still lower than mine, but it's only because he's taller. 

Because he's such a good catch, when new people meet us, they often assume he married me when I was thin and that I gained weight after having children.

But the joke's on them.

Our size differences have never mattered to either of us and that's what counts.

Recently, Kevin and I were hiking in Blue Ridge with our kids — yes, overweight people hike. We saw a sign that said bears were in the area. He turned to me and said, "In the event we see a bear, we both agree that we let the bear take the slowest one of us and the other keeps going with the children."

I nodded in agreement with slight tears in my eyes at his magnanimous gesture. Clearly, this means the bear will eat him. I might be the elephant in the relationship, but he knows I can outrun him any day of the week. Being thinner does not make him faster.

Julie and Kevin. Image: Supplied.

In conclusion, why did my husband marry me despite my extra pounds? Because he needs me to outrun the bear and protect the children. He also would rather build me up than tear me down. I hope everyone can be so lucky and that we can dismantle the toxic label of being in a "mixed-weight relationship".

This article originally appeared on Medium and has been republished here with permission. For more from Julie Calidonio, follow her on Medium or Instagram.

Feature Image: Supplied.