This took place one year after I had quietly excused myself from dating apps. The whole exercise of online dating had been exhausting, as it is for so many. But online dating as a fat woman meant that every message was a minefield, poised to shred through my tender body. The only question was when the blast would come.

A few years earlier, I’d begun talking with someone who was cute, flirtatious, smart and warm. We began to arrange a dinner together when my prospective date interjected with a question. Why did you include that third pic? It seems to exist only to negate the cuteness of the first two.

The first two were pictures of my face. The third was my body.

We did not speak again.

Some months earlier, I’d gone on a first date with another promising person. During his first drink, he shared that he used to be fat himself. During his second, he announced, you know what I like about you? You’re all about fat pride. I used to feel that way, too, until I realized I wanted anyone to f — me ever.

I asked for the check. He asked if he could go home with me. There was no second date.

Over time these experiences left me deeply rattled, certain that any partner who would have me would be plagued with resentment for my body, deep insecurities over their own, or some more sinister pathology.

Later, I began dating a bodybuilder. M was direct, commanding, disarming and unusually forthright. I fell hopelessly in love, swept up in this unlikely partner’s intensity, vulnerability, drivenness, swagger and directness. We were abruptly thrown into the depths of each other’s lives, shedding one another’s light on the darkest corners of ourselves. It was so strange, so foreign to feel held so completely.

M’s thirst for my body was never slaked. For one year, our relationship was unlike any I’d had, supercharged with desire and longing, a steady and comforting pressure. But the times I felt furthest from this love of ours were when M complimented my body. I was unaccustomed to such intense attention, especially in a world that instructed partners of fat people to look past our bodies, as if our bodies were some external inconvenience. As if our souls could be separated from our skin. But M loved every part of mine, wanted to touch it all, wanted it forever.

Over time, acquaintances would cautiously ask about M. Have you talked about what you see in each other? Like, what does M see in you? One friend confided that she found the fact of our dating unsettling and untrustworthy. When I asked her why, she chose her words carefully. Doesn’t it seem kind of opportunistic? Then, after a moment of silence, is it a fat fetish thing?

Their gingerly posed questions underscored my own quiet uncertainties and insecurities. Like them, I had learned that bodies like mine were impossible to want. The only way for any of us to conceive of my body as being desirable was if that desire was pathological. M couldn’t just love me, couldn’t just want me. That want had to be a darker turn, something murky, unsettling, unsafe.

Like my friends, I couldn’t separate predatory attitudes from garden variety attraction to a body like mine. Any desire for my body had to be like, a fat fetish thing.