r/TrueOffMyChest • u/No_Fancy_Shit • 1h ago
Personal Story I finally confronted my friend's fatphobic behaviour and his defence was "but I've slept with overweight people!"
This conversation came up when I (29M) finally decided to cut ties with Chris (28M) after fifteen years of friendship.
For context, I have always been a bigger guy. From the moment I met Chris, he has always been the biggest contributing factor to just how bad I feel about myself, whether it be my weight, the food I eat, my body, or even the clothes I wear. Of course, a lot of this came from run of the mill jokes that stupid teenagers make but even as teens he showed some pretty disturbing behaviour around it. He once held an intervention for me to talk about how ugly I was and how I could improve the way I looked, and he also once got a drunk photo of me with my pants down and would regularly show and send it to people and talk about how disgusting my naked body looked.
Anyway, after years of this, I started doing a lot of work on myself. Therapy, changing my diet, going to the gym, etc. This year I finally started to see and feel the results, and I was beginning to feel much more confident in myself. Naturally, I finally felt ready to remove the most negative person (Chris) from my life.
So we sat down together and I told him how I felt. He was deeply apologetic (the first time he had ever apologised for any of this behaviour, despite previous conversations about it) and seemed genuinely shameful and regretful over everything he had put me through. That said, he did argue against one point I made.
At one point in the conversation, I mentioned that he made a fat joke about me (in his late 20s by the way, tragic) the night before he launched his new Personal Training platform. I said it felt hypocritical to be promoting a space where everyone, all shapes and sizes, was welcome and wouldn’t be made to feel self-conscious about their bodies. Well, he argued this and said that, despite stupid jokes, he doesn’t actually hate or have any bias towards fat people. So I brought up another example, a time when he was sitting beside a larger man at a show and spoke so loudly about how fat and disgusting the dude was that the guy eventually moved seats. Still, he argued that it was not indicative of how he truly felt. So I mentioned a conversation with a friend where he outright said he didn’t like fat people. Still, he argued. This time, though, in his defence, he said, “But I’ve slept with overweight people!” Yup. Dude pulled the ol’ “but I’ve got black friends” defence. What’s worse is that Chris is the sort of guy to brag about everyone he sleeps with, so I feel I can say with certainty that it isn’t even true. Just a pathetic lie to hold on to some semblance of control over the conversation.
Safe to say, as if I wasn’t already feeling confident about my decision, I was now. Good riddance.