Years ago, around the time that many of my male friends were getting married, I noticed something. A few months after the ceremony — after the wedding pictures were framed and displayed, after the tropical honeymoon was a happy memory — my friends started getting fat.
And noticeably so. Their shirts would be stretched taut against their bellies, little darts of flesh visible as the shirt fronts pooched out. Their belts started migrating south, the fronts tucked below the stomach and the backs still high on the hips. Their faces were flusher and thicker, and when they tapped out messages on their phones — usually texts to their new brides, something like “be home soon bby can i bring u sumthing” while finishing one last beer with their old friends — it was mostly typos created by their newly pudgy fingers.
We would joke with them that it was clearly domestic bliss, or letting themselves go in preparation for children, middle age, and death — guys, I don’t need to tell you, reserve their meanest comments for the best friends — but most of the newly-fat grooms were baffled by the weight gain. “I’m not eating a lot, I promise!” They would insist. “I’m going to the gym as often as I used to!” They would swear.
And yet, when we would visit our old pals at home, we’d notice the ubiquitous presence of salty carbohydrates — pretzels and chips and things stuffed with peanut butter and cheese. Good beer in the refrigerator. Ice cream in the freezer. Things that, when he was single, our friend never had around the house due to the disorganized laziness that affects all men from the age of 17 to, roughly, retirement. Suddenly, all of those treats were within arm’s reach.
What became clear, to those of us who remained unmarried anyway, was that their wives were making them fat. It was the new brides, now settled and happy with a man in the nest, who were — maybe subconsciously, maybe not so much — trying to fatten up the men in order to make them less attractive. There is no reason, went the unspoken evolutionary biological imperative, for a married man to look good. Who is he trying to attract? Was the silent accusation. He’s got everything he needs right at home. And to prove it was a larder stuffed with goodies.
I don’t think the wives knew what they were doing. These were, to a woman, smart and independent career women in finance and the law. They would have loudly, angrily denied doing any such thing, and would probably refuse to speak to their husband’s (stupid) friend, who (jokingly, he thought) suggested such a thing. (Trust me on that one.)
But biology is biology, no matter how unmodern it is. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything less up-to-date than human biology. And the complex workings of the human mammal’s drive to pair up and nest and people the valley with offspring is impossible to fathom.
What I learned, though, was that it’s better to shut up about it. And to be honest, as I got older, we all got fat, making it hard to remember the pioneers of the untucked polo shirt among our friends. It wasn’t until this week, in fact, that it all came back to me.
A young woman I know asked about the church I attend. She has had some bad luck in the dating market, she told me. Did I know, she asked, if there were any nice newly-married couples among the Sunday crowd at my church?
Didn’t she mean single men? I asked. And she sighed a God-you-are-so-slow-old-man sigh. No, she said with emphasis, she wants more newlywed couples in her life. “A single woman hanging around a lot of freshly-married guys makes the wives nervous and activates something deep in the reptile brain. They can’t help themselves. They’ll focus on finding me a good single guy to take me out off the market. I’m what you call a free radical, and nature hates that.”
I told her that she was a genius, and she agreed. But I cautioned her about sharing this theory with any of her smart, independent career women friends in business and law, and she nodded. “That’s why I’m looking for a new church,” she said. “Nature is nature,” she said, “but no one wants to talk about it.”
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
