A Beautiful Woman Never Starves
Emily Cementina on divorcing young, stress-induced anorexia, and exchanging self-control for self-sufficiency.
When I was 29, I left my marriage. Within three months of moving out of the apartment I shared with my then-husband, I dropped close to 15 percent of my body weight. This was a substantial enough loss to put my BMI solidly in the “underweight” category. After sustaining this weight for several months, my period stopped, daily bruises appeared on my legs and arms, my breasts grew smaller, firmer, and more fibrous, to the extent that my gynecologist took note, and whenever I showered, clumps of hair swirled around the drain.
My ex-husband and I met when I was 22 and he was 38. I was a bartender. He was a guest. A regular. We were both writers. Or, I should say, he was a writer, and I wanted to become one. Our connection was fast, thrilling, and, I believe, based largely on my desire (conscious or not) to be submissive and his desire (conscious or not) to be dominant. There were layers—depths—to the relationship that also had to do with being artists, with being only children, with being New Yorkers, with loving music and nightlife and all the joy and destruction that comes with them, but dominance and submission, from my perspective, was the cornerstone. Photos of the harm I asked him to do to my body during our first months together, still stored in some hard-to-find file on my phone, are the evidence.
Now, at age 35, I cannot conceive of the idea of being intimate with a 19-year-old. I teach college students who are this age, and they seem, to me, like children. Still, I don’t blame him. We all know our society rewards youth, obsesses over it, devours it, sucks it from anywhere it can. How could I expect him to be immune?
Besides, I was eager. Raised by two parents who have been together since they were teenagers, I grew up idolizing their commitment. During a college visit, I remember walking by the NYU library and saying, Perhaps my future husband is there. When I started dating my eventual-husband, I told him, as we strolled through Bryant Park, that my biggest goal was to be married. I taped a photo of my parents—in their twenties, brushing their teeth side by side in my grandparents’ bathroom—to my own bathroom wall. The first night my ex-husband came to my apartment, I told him the photo was my favorite. What I was asking was, Can you give me this?
I was the first to say I love you. The first to bring up the idea of living together. I threw a series of crying fits before he finally asked me to move in, ditto for proposing. I pushed and pushed—I bullied—and eventually, I wore him down.
When I left him, the choice was quick. I was in yoga teacher training, listening to the instructor explain the concept of false centers. Sometimes, she told us, we believe our centers to be in places that, anatomically, they are not. But even though these centers are false, we’re so used to tuning to those points, we don’t realize we’re sending our bodies into misalignment.
Our lives can be like this too, she explained. We build around a person, and the structure we’ve built prevents us from seeing the instability of the foundation.
A light clicked on.
A few days later, I went to see a tiny, one-window bedroom in an apartment rented by a couple who was friends with my best friend. A week later, I moved in.
When I left him, that I could decide what and when to eat felt like an opportunity to correct unhealthy habits. We drank too much—nightly—and ate beyond what we needed at least once a week. On our way home from a night out, we stopped at the Mexican diner a few blocks from our apartment for a second late-night dinner. I had come to portion my meals the same as he did, even though he was twice my size. At first, I began shedding pounds simply because his appetite wasn’t there to match.
Soon, though, two slices of bread with peanut butter became one slice, dry. A snack of crackers and cheese became exactly fourteen almonds. A cheese sandwich became a half of a pita with hummus. A bowl of pasta and sauce became, eventually, yet another piece of toast. Two scoops of ice cream became a cookie became two dates. A half of a bottle of wine became two glasses became one.
Among so many other digits, so many bills and payment plans and monthly balances that seemed to pile on top of me without my consent, the number on the scale was the only one over which I had any influence. I could manipulate it to the decimal point.
At first, the lightness felt miraculous—it signaled my passage into a new, better identity. It was a visual manifestation of an internal stripping down, the sloughing off of ideas and expectations about marriage I’d internalized, which did not resonate with who I truly was. The weight loss was physical proof that I was transforming. Once the transformation was complete, I would emerge a new woman in possession of qualities that had previously eluded me—independence, strength, self-sufficiency.
I did not earn enough to cover my new living expenses. My then-husband paid the mortgage on the one-bedroom he’d bought in south Brooklyn, and I was not used to factoring rent into my budget. I had student loans. For a time after we split, I continued to pay his health insurance, partially out of pressure from him, partially out of guilt. Later, there would be legal fees. Payments owed to the IRS because—not officially divorced, but not on amicable terms—we filed married but separate, and when he chose to itemize, I was forced into giving up the standard deduction. By the end of it all, I had acquired nearly $10,000 of credit card debt.
To afford my new freedom, I had to hustle. In addition to adjuncting at two different schools—a notoriously unsteady way of making money—I picked up shifts at two bars where I’d worked previously. I took catering gigs—arranged plates of cheese, set up candy stations, stuffed gift bags, delivered birthday mocktails to eleven-year-olds in the spacious Wall Street office of one of their father’s architecture firms. I started tutoring at a third school, on the opposite end of Manhattan. I was always in motion, hauling myself from Midtown to Gramercy to Tribeca and then back to Brooklyn for a serving shift in the same day.
Nothing was guaranteed. Everything was temporary. And I think fear—the adrenaline that comes from knowing that if you don’t work, if you miss one gig, there’s no safety net—was all that kept me going.
Often, anorexia is described as a form of control.
When I ask myself why the stress of my divorce manifested as disordered eating, the easy answer is that among so many other digits, so many bills and payment plans and monthly balances that seemed to pile on top of me without my consent, the number on the scale was the only one over which I had any influence. I could manipulate it to the decimal point.
The more complicated answer is that my weight loss also became a form of currency. If you marry young, if you enter a monogamous relationship young, you give up the opportunity to be sexually free in your twenties. When I met the man who would become my husband, I could count the number of people I’d slept with on one hand. Because of the initial physical intensity of that relationship—and because of what I now view as my near-sighted drive to find a partner—I did not see this as a sacrifice. However, when I thought of the extra sixteen years of casual sex he had been able to have, I felt sick with jealousy.
During our time together, I interpreted the jealousy as a consummate possessiveness: not only did I want him in the current moment, I wanted him not to have had others before me. After three months of a “separation” during which we promised to remain faithful despite living in different apartments, we officially decided to divorce, and I found that my perception of jealousy shifted. Now, I was acutely aware of wanting to get even, to make up for the encounters our marriage had prevented me from having. I felt we were in a competition only I knew or cared about, and I quickly got to work.
At the weight I was before I left him, I often felt stuffed into clothes, self-conscious of my belly or thighs or my flabby arms, worried about how my chin might appear in photos. Suddenly, I was drowning in the shorts I’d worn the summer before. Where the denim had once pressed against my waist, there was now a gap large enough to fit both hands. When I saw my shadow, my silhouette formed a line instead of curves.
Because our society idolizes not just youth but thinness, as well as a woman’s ability to deny, everyone took notice. Friends, coworkers, family members, classmates in yoga school, the female department head at one of the colleges where I adjuncted all commented on my appearance. And, most importantly, the online dates—which I treated like items on a to-do list that I couldn’t wait to check off—marveled at how my naked body looked in their beds.
Their compliments were fuel to my fire. I restricted further, growing faint as I climbed subway stairs or handed off martinis to tables of party-goers. When my efforts were rewarded with praise, I grew more confident in my body. I began to believe I really did have something to offer.
With each new notch on my bedpost, I put more distance between me and my ex-husband, while, paradoxically, fashioning my life to more closely resemble what I imagined his looked like before me. My new body was how I made this happen. My new body would bring me out of submission—so I thought.
My ex-husband once told me that a beautiful woman never starves. That women had the option of relying on their looks to gain financial security made him feel bitter, or envious maybe. He wanted access to this bartering tool, not understanding that it’s one we often choose as a last resort, or because we have no other options.
I don’t know if I’m beautiful, but I do know that a man two decades my senior—who didn’t know much about me beyond my face and my ability to make small talk—reached out and recommended I apply for a full-time position where he worked, just as I was burning out from the strain and uncertainty of gigging, just as the debt felt insurmountable.
I was qualified for the position, and it was someone else who eventually interviewed me and determined me fit for the job. But it was his reference that got me in the door.
You could say I was doing what everyone else does to get work—using connections. You could say I’m reading too much into what was nothing more than a kind offer. You could say I was drowning, and his was the only hand that appeared. Not knowing what later help would arrive, I grabbed hold.
This new, full-time position allowed me a routine, stability, a consistent income, a 401(k), and an easy commute. I settled right in. I kept one of my waitressing jobs for another year, but when the debt I owed the IRS was paid off, when my credit card balance hit zero, I was able to quit hospitality for good.
Slowly, I regained some of the weight I had lost. My hair grew in thicker, fat softened the sharp edges of my hipbones, the hollows of my cheeks filled out. Instead of simply slipping off my jeans to go to the bathroom, I now, as intended, unbutton the fly. Often, after meals, my stomach pushes against my waistband. I allow myself to eat dessert, and occasionally, I enjoy it without guilt. My period has returned, with a consistency and vigor that still surprises me.
It took time, but eventually I stopped seeing sex as a way to regain the years I felt my marriage had taken from me. I realized that what I had actually missed out on during the years I spent as a wife was more time to have dinner with friends, to write, to travel, to run, to take long train rides out to the Rockaways and swim in the Atlantic, to take aimless, nighttime walks through the city with no one but myself. Rather than continuing to chase a fleeting and superficial reward, I focused on making room for these experiences. And, despite believing that I never would again, I fell in love.
Still, there are moments when I long for my smaller body. I know I shouldn’t. I don’t want to succumb to sexist beauty standards—I don’t, in my heart, believe in them. I want to be healthy, want to be grounded in my life in a way that’s impossible when obsessing. But, sometimes, I can’t help but wish my silhouette still formed a line.
It’s not about wanting external approval, getting even, or seeing proof of change.
It’s about liminality. Being on the edge, unsure if you’re going to fall in or maintain your footing. That sensation in your chest the millisecond before you catch yourself after a slip—it’s singular.
beautifully written
This is stunning and painfully relatable. I loved it.