The Fat Girl Diaries: Love and a lot of us.

"It's not all that difficult," Someone told me recently "to look past what is on the outside." If I agreed, there would be no blog. It is, I say, ridiculously difficult and tiring to look past the 'looks' and into the person, and I for one would rather just observe than judge. So here's a blog I'm sure most readers won't agree with.
Looking at my (and that of a number of people I know) romantic past, I would say a majority agrees. With me. Its not just the physical looks I mean, but the number of unneccessary, irrelevant defences that people put up when faced with other people. Sometimes it gets way too hard to tell where the defences end and the 'person' begins. And this lecture is now going way off the topic.
I started watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S about 10 months ago. Needless to say, I love it and don't mind watching reruns in the least. I've now also successfully classified my friends into Rachel, Pheobe, Monica, Ross, Chandler and Joey - types. No-one is exactly one of these characters, but they all have some dominant traits. I won't go through all of them, but will proceed to the most important comparisons.
Rachel - beautiful, fashion-oriented, looking for love and is eternally hopeful.
Monica - obssessive, compulsive, competitive. Once fat, but now skinny and beautiful. Seems to direct her love for food towards cooking rather than eating. (I wish)
I think its unneccessary, since I'm writing this blog, to mention that I'm a Monica. Like her, I'm obsessive-compulsive, competitve and... still fat. I love cooking, but I've discovered that when you cook, eating is tiresome. Which is not to say that I'm a bad cook (not at all), but by the time I'm done cooking, I'm so tired, I don't want to eat.
Monica dates a number of men over the seasons, finally settling for Chandler, whom she'd unsuccessfully tried to woo during high school. The sitcom ended with the two, happily married and adopting twins. Nice ending, right? Not for us 'real' women. The point put across, subtly enough was, Monica found romantic bliss only when she lost weight and became what the men around her wanted to see in her.
Then there was the memorable episode when Monica and Ross realised that they'd kissed after a college party (when Monica was still fat), each imagining the other to be someone else.
Ross : "You were my first kiss with Rachel?!"
Monica : "You were my first kiss EVER?!"

Its not just F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Even Meg Cabot - a woman who I believe is as worldly wise as Gabriel Garcia Marquez in her own way - puts this point across in 'Queen of Babble', the story of sweet blabber-mouth, budding vintage wedding-dress salvager Lizzie Nichols who finds happiness with first Luke and then Chaz after she loses 30 pounds for her English boyfriend Andrew (at the start of the book) by 'not touching a bread crumb for 6 months'.
And very honestly, I would prefer a hot guy to a nice guy. At least to look at. ;-)
Need I say more? Monica had to loose weight to get back at (and with) Chandler, so did Lizzie and numerous other women around the world. So lets give up the pretences, shall we? And accept the universal truth. What is on the outside matters. A lot more than what is on the inside.