I used to see stuff on television about convicted murderers serving life sentences meeting someone by mail and marrying them and wonder what in the hell was wrong with me that I was a relatively affluent single guy who couldn't meet women and couldn't connect with any of the ones I did infrequently meet or ocassionally date.

I knew guys who were total deadbeat drunks, mean as snakes, stupid as rocks, as giving as Saddam Hussein, who went from one woman to the next. What was the matter with me?

I felt that besides being fat, that there was something fundamentally the matter with me, and that fat was an expression of some deeper, more deadly flaw. I say earlier in the thread that I think people bear full responsibility for their weight, and I believe that. But what I don't believe is that we should feel ashamed or like lesser people because of that.

I met my wife by a series of random events that make me a believer in fate, because we fit so perfectly. It was only after we met that I started to think I could be loved; every other relationship in my life was short-lived. And I was sure it was because I was fat, and they saw whatever it was that lived under the fat. That massive character flaw I expressed via my fat, that others could sense and I couldn't.

I still don't know what the flaw is, or was, or that it even existed. Maybe I didn't meet the right woman for 37 years because I just hadn't met the right woman. I thought I loved another one, but I really didn't. I didn't understand that at the time.

I've begun to think it wasn't a massive character flaw, but a series of compulsions, apathy -- and yes, physical problems -- that got me to 340 pounds. My perception of self is now that I'm not this massively flawed person who would be better off observing real life than participating in it. That's what I thought most of my life. I've been able to focus on my real flaws and work on them -- the obsession with getting "my share" of the food; my fundamental laziness (I am lazy). My passivity. Those things are just character traits, not this huge flaw I always thought I had.

I felt unlovable, until I found the right person to love. I had these daydreams of how I'd cope in 20 years, being the 400-pound uncle to my brother's children, living alone and unhappy. I look back now and am glad to have survived.

Scott