Weight loss, love and openness about all this

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Before I started to report my article about how slimming drugs change dynamics in romantic relationships, I asked the editors: could we cover the identity of the main characters?

In the articles in Fresh York Times, names are rarely covered. After all, truth is the highest value of journalism, and the facts are the reporter’s currency. Usually, we want the sources to be cited on the album, standing behind what they say, because it causes responsibility and builds confidence in readers.

But I wanted to write about taboos. I wanted to discover the most private couple interactions. I wanted them to talk about sex. And their naked bodies. And their weight. And their home, daily arguments and negotiations. I imagine that the best version of this story would keep the mirror for readers, showing one pair experiencing all lively changes – as well as shame and pride, anger and pleasure – which are with the extreme weight loss of one partner in the scope of slimming one partner. To do this, the respondents would have to agree to as open as possible. They could not worry about a potential explosion in social media or gossip neighbors and colleagues. They had to feel unlimited.

Understanding these circumstances, my editors said yes.

I write about health because I am interested in how people move towards their best in the arena, where perfection is unattainable. For over a year I have been informing about how slimming drugs, such as ozempiic, affect identity. In 2023 I published A profile of a 15-year-old girl, one of the first teenagers Rewriting GLP-1 agonist to lose weight. Then I wrote about Virginia Sole-Smith, a “fat activist”, whose newsletter and books condemning Americans obsessed with slim people found the audience, just as ozmpic goes in the mainstream.

But this was my article about the popularity of breast reduction, which focused on several questions: what does it mean to meet the world as the same person, but in a changed body? What does it mean to absorb all these modern signals – approval, engaging, flirtatious – and return home to a partner who preferred things as they were?

Breast reduction can be a significant, but relatively compact change compared to a loss of 60 or 70 pounds. How can one person undergo a dramatic physical transformation without marriage transformation?

I threw an article on the desk wells. By accident, the editor at The Fresh York Times Magazine, who in her personal life watched friends about drugs in droppings, renegotiating meals, grocery shopping, drinking and sex with partners, reached out and suggested the same story. Editors like to say that the best stories are in text messages. It was like Kismet: Here is an idea in the ether that has not yet been reported. With one in eight Americans who said they tried drugs with weight loss, relationships must change everywhere.

The challenge was to find the right couple. In times, we sometimes publish “next to each other” as a way to cause history from readers. Almost 60 people reacted to one, which I divided on drugs and slimming relationships.

The couples wrote about the mystery of the surrounding drugs. Many people still consider drugs with weight loss to be “effortless” and couples do not want to become a target of judgment. One couple in California described traveling from the city to injections, not to tell anyone, even their adult son. Many also wrote about their sex life. One woman said that she loves her modern body, but drug -related nausea made her not to sex. Another said that he feels Friskier in his 20-year marriage, more often initiating sex.

I spent about a week talking to about half of the qualifying respondents, mainly on the phone. It was a bit like filling the document. People had to be connected with a special experience reflecting a wide, sophisticated phenomenon-also self-reflective. Both partners also had to agree to open their lives in a way that many people would consider interference.

When I met Jeanne and Javier during a video conversation, I knew I found the right pair. Initially, they seemed a bit stiff. Jeanne, especially, wore the atmosphere: “What did you put in now?” But about 20 minutes of our conversation, Jeanne, who lost 60 pounds to Zepbound, described how it was to be public as a couple when she was in a larger body and how she feels now. Javier was shocked. He didn’t know.

“You are amazing,” I said then.

I talked to them, together and separately, personally and on video conversations, for over seven hours in a few weeks. They answered all my rudely personal questions thoughtfully, thinking about my own wounds, shames and motivations, and in real time, in how and whether they can include the reality of the modern body of Jeanne and everything they want both, to their marriage. They asked us to employ their second names to protect their privacy, not to be tasteful, that Jeanne would not experience consistency at work.

Since the publication of the article, my receiving inbox E -Mail has been filled with experience similar to shared Jeanne and Javier. The whole loan is to them, who trusted me with his very complicated and not fully solved love story.