“We’re talking ‘gay fat,’ so not even fat as most people would define it. “ still wouldn’t be acceptable even if it was an extreme catfish situation where I was secretly huge, but I was a 21-year-old kid who didn’t have a flat stomach,” he continues. “It ruined my self-esteem for years.”Īrthur now understands that the man represented an “extreme example” of body negativity, but the situation still baffles him - especially because he wasn’t fat in any real sense of the word. “I ended up crying in Washington Square Park ,” Arthur continues. After a while, he messaged me to say it was because I was too fat for him,” he says, showing me screenshots of the man calling Arthur “incredibly overweight” and chewing him out at length for having “strategically cropped” and “misleading” photos. “I had a guy ghost me after we’d dated online for several weeks and then finally met in New York.
Arthur, a 24-year-old waiter in Melbourne who has asked to be identified by his middle name, is recounting his most brutal rejection.
