Sex File: My wife has lost a lot of weight and looks great

Mon, 14 Aug, 2023 - 20:58

Suzi Godson

My wife and I are in our late fifties with two grown-up children. We had both gained quite a bit of weight over the years, but after joining a local gym and changing her diet she has lost 3.5st and never looked better. I'm happy for her, but her new body has started to make me feel self-conscious about my own. What should I do?

Weight loss is basic maths: fewer calories in added to more calories out equals seeing your toes for the first time in years. It is so obvious, yet while everyone knows what they "ought" to do to lose weight, very few people are able to do it. Your wife has worked very hard and I am sure she looks and feels much better, but don't assume that it will have any impact on how she sees you. She is on her own journey and is, I suspect, much more focused on her own body than marginal changes in your girth.

While I feel your pain, this column is supposed to be about sex, so I find it interesting that you have written in and yet not mentioned your physical relationship with your wife. Are you having any sex? Actually, you don't need to answer that. Your longer letter oozes with so much self-consciousness that I can't imagine you having the confidence to make love to your wife. I think you should try anyway. It is the only way to bridge the emerging divide and you may find that she is much more sexually responsive than she used to be.

Losing a lot of weight - and 3.5st is a life-changing amount - can significantly increase libido, and it can also make it easier for women to achieve orgasm because it increases blood flow, which lubricates the vagina and heightens sensitivity. Getting thinner can also magnify sensation: research conducted in 2017 at Leeds Beckett University found that people who have lost a lot of weight report that touch becomes much more pleasurable. Losing weight also increases body confidence.

Women who have previously been overweight and shy about being seen naked or having sex with the lights on can suddenly behave in a much more confident and exhibitionist way.

Any radical change in a relationship has the potential to cause insecurity, so honesty is crucial. We all know middle-aged men and women who lost tons of weight but when the real explanation emerged it was one of the dreaded D words: death, divorce or duplicity. These days it is much more likely to be the weight-loss jab Ozempic. Sex creates the right environment for an honest post-coital chat, and you may find that the two of you have been interpreting this situation in wildly different ways.

I once worked with a couple who were in a similar situation to you. It took a while for them to open up but, once they did, it transpired that the husband had stopped initiating sex because he was terrified his newly svelte wife would laugh at his beer belly. But, here's the rub - his wife's sole motivation had been to try to make her husband see her as a sexual person again. The more weight she lost, the more intimidated he felt; and the less he reached out to her, the more rejected she felt.

Their story is unusual, but it is an interesting illustration of how easy it is for couples to misunderstand each other's motivations.