Did I Gain Weight, Or Did Nobody Tell Me I Was Hot Today?

A few days ago, I became convinced I’d put on half a stone.

Not because I’d stepped on the scales. I hadn’t.

Not because my clothes suddenly didn’t fit. They did.

Not because anyone had commented on my body.

I simply tried on a couple of outfits I’d worn earlier this year, looked in the mirror and thought: Oh God. I’ve gained weight.

And the fascinating thing is that I immediately accepted this as fact.

There was no evidence whatsoever.

Except that I didn’t feel hot.

Which, apparently, my brain decided was the same thing.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since, because women’s relationships with their bodies are already complicated enough before you add love, sex, desire, ageing, hormones, weight loss, social media and the small matter of standing under the overhead light in a changing room.

But I wonder how much of the way we perceive ourselves has absolutely nothing to do with what we actually look like.

And how much of it comes down to whether anybody is currently reflecting desirability back at us.

When I was in a relationship earlier this year, I felt incredibly sexy.

Now, I was slightly lighter by the end of that relationship than I had been at the beginning, but not dramatically so. The difference between then and now is certainly not enough to explain the completely different woman I sometimes seem to see when I look in the mirror.

Back then, I had evidence.

There was someone who fancied me.

Someone who looked at me in a particular way.

Someone who touched me.

Someone who told me I was attractive.

Someone who made me feel desirable.

And perhaps most importantly, there was somebody onto whom I could project this version of myself.

Sexy Mandy existed because I felt sexy, but she also existed because somebody else appeared to agree with me.

Then the relationship ended.

And suddenly the evidence stopped arriving.

This is where I want to be very careful, because this isn’t an essay about women needing male validation.

I know women who feel at their absolute hottest when they’re single. They leave relationships, lose half a stone, cut their hair, buy excellent underwear and emerge six weeks later looking like they’ve been personally sponsored by Beyoncé.

There are also women who talk about relationship weight as though it’s an unavoidable side effect of heterosexuality. You fall in love, spend six months ordering Deliveroo together and suddenly none of your jeans fit.

That hasn’t really been my experience.

For me, being in love seems to turn something on.

I dress differently. I go out more. I photograph myself more. I feel observed, in the nicest possible way. There is a kind of erotic electricity running underneath ordinary life.

And when that disappears, I don’t immediately replace it with some fabulous, empowered, single-woman glow.

Sometimes I stay in the house and eat sweets.

Which is probably less cinematic.

There are other things going on for me too. I’ve lost a lot of weight over the last few years, and medication has played a significant part in that. Bodies change. Hormones change. Appetite changes. Menopause changes things. Mood certainly changes things.

But I think there is something else happening.

Perception changes.

The strange thing about bodies is that we never see them objectively.

There is no neutral mirror.

We look through whatever emotional weather happens to be passing through our lives at the time.

When I’m happy, busy, flirted with, photographed, wanted and wearing something fabulous, I can look at myself and think: Bloody hell, you look good.

Give me a lonely Sunday, an unanswered dating app, an old photograph from a happier month and too much time alone with my thoughts, and suddenly I’m apparently three dress sizes bigger.

Same woman.

Same mirror.

Different evidence.

And perhaps that is the part I find most unsettling.

Because I like to think that at 52 I have reached some enlightened stage of womanhood where I know who I am independently of whether somebody fancies me.

I have raised children. Built businesses. Lost five stone. Reinvented myself more times than Madonna. I have survived heartbreak, illness, divorce and the early 2000s eyebrow situation.

Surely I should be beyond needing somebody else to confirm that I’m attractive.

Except perhaps that’s not really what’s happening.

Maybe desire is relational by its very nature.

You can believe that you are attractive in theory, but there is something uniquely powerful about seeing yourself through somebody else’s eyes.

We do this with all sorts of things.

You can believe you’re funny, but hearing somebody laugh feels good.

You can believe you’re talented, but somebody choosing your work feels good.

You can believe you’re beautiful, but somebody looking at you like you are still does something.

That doesn’t necessarily mean our confidence is fake.

It means human beings are social creatures, and our identities are partly constructed through reflection.

The problem comes when the reflection disappears and we mistake the absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

Nobody is telling me I’m hot right now.

That is not the same thing as not being hot.

Nobody is currently lying next to me thinking I look gorgeous in the morning.

That does not mean I suddenly stopped being gorgeous in the morning.

There simply isn’t a witness.

And I think that distinction matters.

Because otherwise it is frighteningly easy to rewrite our bodies according to whatever is happening in our romantic lives.

Loved equals beautiful.

Single equals undesirable.

Wanted equals thin.

Rejected equals fat.

None of those equations make any logical sense.

Yet I suspect quite a lot of women know exactly what I mean.

So perhaps the work of being single, for me at least, isn’t learning to stop caring whether anybody ever finds me desirable again.

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t want to be desired.

I do.

I like sex and romance and chemistry and somebody thinking I look incredible in a dress.

I would quite like all of that again.

The work is learning not to interpret the temporary absence of those things as proof that something has gone wrong with me.

Perhaps the goal isn’t to become so fiercely independent that I never need another person to tell me I’m beautiful.

Perhaps it’s simply to be able to stand in front of the mirror during the quiet periods and remember that beauty doesn’t vanish just because nobody is currently narrating it.

I didn’t gain half a stone that afternoon.

I lost an audience.

Those are not the same thing.