How I became Fat, Tapped and Lonely
At eighteen I thought I was on the top of the world. My family lived on a 110 foot yacht in a Los Angeles marina. I never lived in a house until after high school. It was a unique childhood environment and it created a certain small status in school as did my long involvement in competitive judo. I had a very happy childhood. My parents, like many of my readers, showed little emotional love to either of us brothers or to each other for that matter.
Don’t get me wrong, they loved each other and both of their sons, they just did not say it often or demonstrate it physically. The only way they seemed to be able to show affection to us was by making sure we had what we needed and by supporting our dreams and activities. The one bit of affection they showed each other was a daily beck on the lips as my Dad left for work.
My dream was to be like Captain Stubbing on the Love Boat. The Love Boat was a comedy released in 1977 staring Gavin MacLeod as the captain of the Love Boat which was a Princess Cruise Lines ship.
I already knew a great deal about ships, the sea and being a sailor. After being accepted to California Maritime Academy in Vallejo to be a ships officer my life’s dream looked like it was on the fast track.
Despite not being a snappy dresser, (thanks to my parent’s frugality and mother’s penchant for making Hawaiian shirts for us to wear to school), I had little trouble attracting girls or talking to most of them. My main problem was not knowing how to act like a man around them. This resulted in me turning girls off completely or moving me immediately into friend zone.
Despite making frequent beta male mistakes I persevered and continued to ask girls out. I fell hard for one girl; but my putting her on a pedestal like a princess and asking her if I could kiss her threw me into friend zone…never to recover.
Despite being just friends we decided to go to prom together and after prom we went on a double date with a moonlight motorboat ride in the harbor…with me as captain of course.
It is funny how life works out. Our friends, the other coupe riding along in the boat, included a red head kid that would turn out to be gay and a very sweet young lady who would turn out to be my future wife and a wonderful mother to my two darling daughters.
I ended up dating my future wife when I asked her best friend out on a date. Her friend did not want to go out with me, but accepted, knowing my future wife did. When I arrived for our date I was confused as there was another guy there along with my future wife. The object of my affection explained the other guy was to be her date and she was pulling the old’ switcheroo on me. Surprise!
She was a very sweet girl and we had a good time. We continued to date and got closer until I got up the courage to kiss her on her Dad’s the front porch. I still think of that night when I smell jasmine as they had it planted by the door.
We continued to hang out, have fun and hook up several times a week and I was in seventh heaven. We were in love, it was amazing and I don’t think either of us believed such happiness was possible.
During that summer, after graduating high school, I received some devastating news from the maritime academy…my eyesight was not sharp enough to attend the academy. I would not be allowed to captain a ship.
After my career dreams of being a ship captain went into the toilet, my girlfriend and I got closer and closer in our relationship. She was a really great girl and I moved into her apartment. After four years living together we got married but only after she asked me to ask her. Another beta male move!
What started off as head over heel’s in love, slowly morphed into a marriage in trouble and finally into roommates. Growing up with parents that showed little love to each other, I went out into the relationship world feeling unloved and unlovable. With the mindset that that’s just how relationships are, having no example of a loving healthy relationship, I felt like this was normal. That’s why falling in love was so unexpected at first. When loving feelings started to fade that felt normal.
I stopped being the planner and decision maker and I became very passive and let her run the household. We discussed things but she had the final decision on everything. Over the years she became less feminine, cut her hair, stopped wearing make-up, doing her nails, wearing dresses, shut down and wanted to spend less and less time together. She kept her schedule full of family, work, volunteering and computer games. She wanted less and less emotional connection and intimacy eventually became frigid, addicted to computer games and quite resentful of the beta male I had turned into.
I felt like I was trapped and lonely and came to believe this was just my lot in life and there is no way to get out of it. This is just how it’s going to be.
When I asked for a divorce we had been hanging out as roommates and hadn’t had sex for years. With some professional help I had cured my binge eating disorder and had stopped using food to fill myself up with good sensations that were missing from my marriage.
I was very much a man and she effeminate girl when we met, she was attracted to me from the start and my behavior while dating caused the attraction to build until she fell love with me. The problems began when she began to be more assertive and I became more passive. It was the way we both grew up with Dads who acted like beta males when interacting with their wives.
I allowed her to push me off my center until she could have her way with me in any decisions that she wanted to make. Slowly over time she became more dominant and I became more passive which led to more passive aggressive behavior on both our parts. The more she became like a roommate and the more I became like a timid pleaser, the less interest she had in sex the more she dressed herself either masculine or neutral.
Prior to meeting and getting married to me, her childhood was difficult and she had some struggles to overcome in school as an adolescent. So after losing the feeling of being in love in our marriage, she reverted to a familiar family dynamic of a passive father, domineering mother, a general disdain for men in general by all the females in her family and she replaced emotional intimacy with food, children, work, extended family and keeping her life hectic.
Over the thirty-five years we were married, I slowly begin to try to find replacements for the love and emotional intimacy that was missing with a combination of hobbies, exercise and later food. Knowing what I know now about how relationships work, I could’ve probably turned it all around in that first ten year period. It would have been easy by getting her to open up and getting her talk about her feelings, listening with understanding and being in my masculine, beginning to date and court her again. She would’ve fallen back in love with me, started dressing more feminine, sex and intimacy would have in all likelihood come back along with the passion. Although I could’ve made it much better…I’m still not certain it could have been a lifelong relationship.
When I was out with my friends or participating in martial arts, making a speech or sailing a ship, I was a man’s man. When I was with my wife I was a passive beta male. This was because I had a domineering mother and grew up not being comfortable in my masculinity around women. Like so many men I wore this feminine mask of passivity. When we first got together she was in her feminine and I in my masculine and we fell into love quickly. I was really what she wanted in a guy, masculine like a bad boy but without the ‘bad’ part.
Once we both started reverting to the dynamics we grew up in, she started shutting down because of the weakness of her man. I did not make her feel attractive, safe or understood, she was becoming less attracted to me and less compelled to be attractive and attentive for me. In the beginning I was her rock and she was my joy but this was disappearing quickly over the first several years. We both had basically given up and were resigned to the way things are going to be. This despite trying marriage counselling several times.
In 2016 I made the decision to solve my problem of being fat, trapped and lonely. Over the next couple of years I was able to discover the truth about what works and what does not. This was not an easy task. I had tried a great deal ways over thirty years to solve my relationship and weight problems and failed like most people. I knew some folks were successful, but also knew it would take a lot of research to find what really works apply it. It was a monumental task to cut through the bull and find the truth of:
How to recovery from binge and other eating disorders
How to decide if your marriage is savable
How healthy couple relationships work
How to have a good divorce
How to save a savable marriage
How to get your finances in order
How to be a man in today’s environment
How to date and love a woman successfully
The good news is that the truth was out there. And with support I was able to identify it, apply it and find success!
I am putting everything I have learned on this site to “pay it forward” and hopefully help thousands of men (and maybe a few women) free themselves!
Sincerely,
Cappy