“Being fat and happy and in love is still a radical act”

“Being fat and happy and in love is still a radical act” names a refusal of the idea that a fat person must become thinner, healthier by other people’s measures, or otherwise acceptable before being worthy of love. The expression connects the dignity of fat bodies to the freedom to choose a partner and build a joyful life without having either reduced to a verdict on appearance.

Worth Beyond the Scale

The expression grows out of a wider conflict over who gets to define fat people’s value. In the mid-to-late 2000s, as public rhetoric declared a war on obesity, Dan Savage argued against the position that a person could be both obese and healthy. The narrator describes how such arguments treated contempt as concern, framing fat people as threats to public health while obscuring the social conditions that shape health and access to care. Against that atmosphere, the principle that health is not a moral imperative rejects the demand that bodily worth depend on a health judgment.

A different understanding became possible when the narrator encountered Leonard Nimoy’s The Full Body Project. Its black-and-white photographs showed fat, naked women laughing, embracing, and looking directly at the camera; it was the first time the narrator had seen fat women presented without scorn. The images initially provoked discomfort, but also began to loosen the belief that a body like hers had to remain hidden. They offered a concrete alternative to public ridicule: fat bodies could be seen with dignity and as beautiful, rather than treated as punch lines. The narrator came to understand that pride in her body need not exist in spite of its size.

That change does not erase ambivalence. The narrator describes hating the stigma, unwanted scrutiny, and time wasted by strangers claiming concern, while also finding strength and a sense of safety in her body. The expression holds happiness and love alongside that unresolved experience; it does not claim that acceptance makes prejudice disappear. Its defiance lies in insisting that a fat life can contain pleasure, attachment, and self-worth even within a culture that tries to deny them.

Love Beyond Appearance

The narrator rejects the assumption that fat people should pair only with other fat people. She has dated men of different sizes and explains that her partner, Ahamefule J. Oluo, happens not to be fat; his size is not the basis of her affection. Treating fat people as suitable only for one another, she argues, reduces them to bodies and makes their relationships conform to an external sorting rule. The point of love, in this account, is to be more than a match between appearances.

Looking back on her teenage self, the narrator identifies the reassurance she needed: not that someone might love her if she lost enough weight to qualify as human, but that she was already worthy of love. The expression makes that recognition present-tense and unconditional. Love is not a future reward for bodily correction; it is part of a life the narrator can claim as she is.

The Wedding as a Public Claim

That conviction gives the wedding its significance. The narrator says it mattered not for the conventional objects associated with a wedding, but because being fat, happy, and in love remains a radical act. The celebration made the relationship visible without making thinness a condition of belonging or joy.

On her thirty-second birthday, Ahamefule J. Oluo took her to dinner and then suggested a nightcap at their neighborhood bar. Friends, family, children, and a cake were waiting; a paper banner bearing her name hung there, and friends Evan and Sam played a duet on cello and bass. The birthday gathering became a proposal: Ahamefule J. Oluo knelt, presented a ring, and asked her to marry him. The narrator had expected to wait five years, but he proposed after two. The scene gives the expression a lived conclusion: a relationship that outsiders might judge by their bodies instead becomes a shared future celebrated by the people gathered around them.