Rewind: Body Weight and Romance

Dear Sugars

WBUR

Boston, Wbur, Sugar, Cheryl Strayed, Society & Culture, Dear, Relationships, Advice, Steve Almond

4.6 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode was originally released on August 19, 2017. It’s never easy to talk to our romantic partners about their bodies, especially when it’s about weight. The Sugars, along with writer Ashley C. Ford, answer letters from people questioning their relationships because of major changes in their partners’ bodies.

Transcript

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0:34.3	The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick.
0:39.1	The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.
0:42.7	I'm Steve Allman.
0:43.9	I'm Cheryl Strayed.
0:45.0	This is Dear Sugars.
0:49.3	Oh, dear song, won't you please?
1:01.0	Share some little sweet days with me I check my bellbyes every day.
1:17.6	Oh, in the sugar, you see in my way.
1:20.2	Hi, Cheryl.
1:21.4	Hi, Steve.
1:24.6	Today we are going to talk about body weight and romance.
1:29.3	We were getting tons of letters from letter writers who were like most of us in a state of confusion, shame, anguish, conflict about their own bodies and
1:36.5	how profoundly that impacts our effort to love and be loved with partners who also have their
1:42.4	own set of complex fraught feelings about their bodies.
1:45.1	Yeah, and we're going to talk today about what do you do when your partner has a body that
1:50.8	causes you some trouble? You either feel concerned from a health standpoint or turned off from
1:58.6	a sexual desire or physical attraction standpoint when you feel, you know, bewildered about what to do, how to address this.
2:06.8	It's such a complicated thing.
2:08.9	Okay, let me get started with the first letter.
2:12.5	Dear Sugars, my partner's weight has fluctuated throughout her life.
	...

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