It takes a lot of strength to overcome a past built on deprivation and control. She finally did that, only to discover that the man she’s about to marry is secretly pining for the version of her that was barely surviving.
This woman hates talking about her childhood because it wasn’t a happy one. Only one single friend of hers knows the whole story, aside from her family and her fiancé.
You see, her mom and dad desperately wanted her to be a ballerina, so they forced her into doing it. She didn’t get a say.
“My entire life revolved around ballet. I wasn’t even allowed to go to a regular school. I had to have tutors so I could focus on ballet. It didn’t even matter to them that I didn’t want to be a ballerina,” she explained.
“I don’t have a relationship with my parents now. I have been asking some of my relatives to send any old photos they have of me because I don’t really have any.”
“My fiancé and I want to have a slide show at our reception. In one of the photos, I was 17 years old. It would have been about a year before I quit ballet.”
At the time, she weighed about 90 pounds or less than that, and she’s 5’2″ for reference. She was under an immense amount of pressure to be skinny, and everyone around her who weighed a normal amount was shamed about it and called fat.
Many girls she knew had eating disorders, and her parents controlled what she ate so she could be that thin. Since her fiancé got to see that photo of her as a painfully skinny teen, he hasn’t quit talking about how incredible she used to look.
There’s no way you come across that picture and think she looks healthy, because she wasn’t. She was literally starving to be that thin ballerina her parents wanted. She was a fragile shell of herself.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
“But my fiancé keeps talking about it even after I asked him to stop, and I have caught him staring at the photo when he thought he was alone,” she said.
“It has been 14 years since I quit ballet. I weigh [110 pounds] now, and I eat properly. But my fiancé thinks I look better at the weight in the photo. I don’t think I want to get married after what he has said.”
“He knows what my upbringing was like. I have asked him not to talk about my weight, but he’s not listening.”
Her fiancé obsessing over and romanticizing her unhealthy teen body is a major red flag, but it’s good she found this all out before tying the knot with him.
I do think she should call off her wedding, as this has to be incredibly triggering for her. She already requested that he quit talking about how she looked during such a sad moment in her life, and he won’t, so there’s no way this is going to get better.
What do you think?
You can read the original post below.
By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
