Resolving Battles Will Bridge Gap

`Ever since I gained weight, Don has seemed to hate me,” sobs Trudi, 38, a travel agent married for 15 years. “As soon as he gets home from work, he shuts himself in the family room or in his office. In bed, he just reads and goes to sleep. We haven’t made love in months.”

Trudi, who weighs about 220 pounds, admits, “I’ve had a battle with the bulge since third grade.” Trudi’s father, a salesman, was rarely home; when Trudi was in high school, her mother got a job, leaving her to look after her younger brothers and sister in the afternoons. Bored and lonely, Trudi watched soap operas and ate.

Trudi’s luck seemed to change once she went to a large university hundreds of miles from her Ohio home. There, she went to parties, started dating for the first time and lost 25 pounds in just three months. It was then she met Don, who was in the class ahead of hers.

From the beginning, the couple found several things in common. “I also had an unhappy childhood. My family wasn’t at all attentive or affectionate,” explains Don, a 39-year-old geologist. “I dated a little in high school, but Trudi was the first girl who accepted me.” They married a year after Trudi graduated.

Trudi stopped working after she had their first daughter, Amanda, and quickly slipped back into her old habits, watching TV and eating as many as five dishes of ice cream a day. By the time she had Stacey three years later, Trudi was obese and miserable.

Don doesn’t deny that he finds Trudi unattractive. “I don’t like having a fat wife,” he explains. “My mother has always been overweight, and I was ashamed of her when I had to introduce her to my friends. Now my wife turns to food whenever she feels bad and constantly makes excuses for not going to diet meetings. All my sexual interest in her has evaporated because, frankly, I really do consider her my enemy.”

Don says he feels this way in part because Trudi has a short fuse, and he feels she attacks him and the girls for no reason.

Trudi admits that she does take her frustrations out on the children.

“Trudi and Don are acting out their childhood roles in their marriage. She’s still the `trained mother’ and he’s the `abandoned child,”’ explains Patricia Allen, Ph.D., a marriage and family therapist based in Los Angeles and Newport Beach, Calif., and co-author of “Staying Married … and Loving It” (Avon, 1998).

When Trudi and Don first met, both were able to stray from those familiar patterns long enough to fall in love, Allen says. But as Don became more confident and selfsufficient in his career, Trudi remained entrenched in the “mothering” position. Both partners were so starved for love and attention that they found it almost impossible to care for each other.

Trudi and Don needed to recognize how often they pushed each other’s emotional buttons. Don’s withdrawal was his way of punishing Trudi because she reminded him of his overweight mother. Trudi had learned her authoritarian parenting style from her early years of looking after her siblings, but her temper drove her own children away from her.

Through a year of individual and group therapy, the couple learned to communicate. Trudi stopped snapping at her family and started listening to her husband as he opened up to her. Now Trudi finds a newfound respect for Don.

To lose weight, Trudi needed emotional support. She and Don went to a nutritionist, who taught them how to prepare low-fat, nutritious meals. Trudi exercises at home with a treadmill and free weights; so far, she’s lost 20 pounds. Don also enlisted their daughters to pitch in around the house to help alleviate some of the stress that triggered Trudi’s eating binges.

Lastly, Trudi discovered she needed to learn how to meet her own needs. She had always wanted to start her own business, so she and a friend launched a small yet profitable catering company. Trudi proudly boasts that she does the extra cooking without too much tasting.

As Trudi toned up and the two started communicating again, the romance returned to their relationship. They report that sex is now more loving and emotionally satisfying than ever before, proving that you don’t have to look like Ally McBeal to have a happy love life.