Dear Lonely Hearted

Mojo posted this on the My Fat Spouse forum last week! I haven't been able to find the original thread, but Archie is all over it and I think we should be able to put it back up on the forum eventually.


I happened to stumble upon this little gem which was among one of my first posts that I fortunately had saved from an old posting made on the original MFS or one of the other MFS refugee forums sometime in FEB09 AC(After Crash). Sorry I don't have the rest of the original thread; perhaps ArchieArchive or any of the other more technically savvy equipped members could resurrect this thread if they felt it worth while? I have posted my response to LonelyHearted(Former MFSer or Alias?) in its entirety save only a minor few grammatical or syntax errors:


LonelyHearted, Why are you lonely? I don't know if your question was directed to me or Devil or both of us, or neither, but thanks for the input and joining in the foray ;-) As for me, to put it simply, Yes and No, and No and Yes.
No, I did not marry my wife exclusively based on her looks, but for starters her looks were definitely what got me first looking. If she had not looked the way she did then, but instead how she looks now(about 120+ extra lbs) I would not had even looked, let alone gotten to the dating, engagement, and eventually marriage part. Is that shallow? Maybe, but it is also human nature, a nature that has until now has ensured humanity’s survival as a species. Yes, I did ultimately marry her based on who I thought she was as a person. As a person she is great concerning many aspects of personality, but who I thought she was as a whole, is not who she turned out to be: concerning other aspects which I told her before our engagement were very important to me. And I, according to my wife am not who she thought I was-that is someone who said I was someone who valued health and appearance, but really didn't mean it or in her opinion wasn’t supposed to have meant it. In actuality I meant every word I told her before we got married, that is, that I could not stay married to someone who would be so disrespectful as to willfully make their self unattractive to their loved one by engaging in glutinous over-eating as I had witnessed other close family and extended family members do to the detriment and ultimate ruination of their marriage and happiness. Is my attitude selfish? Yes, of course it is. But it is an attitude that ensures best possible chance for the survival of my posterity. But is this type of selfishness regarding selection of a mate evil? I don’t believe so. If man was not endowed with such innate qualities and desires he would have gone the way of the DoDo bird long ago.

Reality is what it is. We are all just a little higher than the animals when it comes to mating, as the Creator designed us. Instilled within each of us, but perhaps suppressed by centuries of altruistic programing by various institutions, there are the basic survival instincts that helped insure not only our individual survival, but the survival of the human race. Anyone who is alive today is so because of the choices of their ancestors, and more often than not, many of those choices were based first upon a look. Looks can often be deceiving, but to the wise and careful observer, they are usually very revealing concerning the actual nature of nearly ever tangible and non-tangle element.

You can't always judge a book by its cover, but it's usually a good place to start when you have millions to choose from. I’m with Tealeaf, a person’s appearance is usually a pretty good indicator of their character. Human’s are just a little better at deception than are animals in nature. So our cognitive abilities to “cut though the crap” have to be a little sharper, and more in tune when selecting a mate. The female peacock, for example, has only to look at the large bright tail feathers of the male peacock which in its natural environment are like a flashing neon sign advertising to all predators,”Here I am! Come and eat me if you can!” The peahen instinctively knows that the presentation of the peacock’s large, beautiful, fan is Nature’s Highest ‘UL’ Stamp of Approval for Natural Selection and Genetic Survivability Award. Humans, as a species, have many ways they can ‘fake’ the peacock’s tail fan. Because of man’s unique qualities as compared to his animal counterparts, the numerous variables involving this process of mating and selection in humans becomes exponentially more complex.

Though mankind in general has advanced in his world beyond a mere subsistence and day to day survival mode, we are still guided by a deep rooted and inborn survival instinct. When you go to the grocery store, why do you go to a particular store? Do you go to the closest, the cheapest, or the cleanest? As for me, unless I’m buying auto-parts or lumber, if I walk into a store and it looks more like Akabar’s Camel Stop & Go than a grocery store, I don’t get to find out how good the prices are because I don’t care. A filthy or unkept store is usually good enough to tell most prudent shoppers that the fare is in about the same condition. That’s why many of the most profitable businesses have floors that you could almost eat off of-regardless of what they are selling. It is just human nature for every individual to seek the highest quality that is attainable based on his own means. Go into a dive where you can’t tell if the floor is dirt, wood, or dung, and take a look at the majority of the patrons-this is the law of attraction in action. Now, after you’ve made that choice as to what grocer from which to buy vegetables, fruit, meat or bread or what have you, do you pick the oldest, the most rotten, or molded items because you feel sorry for them? Or do you rather pick the cleanest, freshest, purest, best smelling, ripest or soon to be ripest, healthiest appearing and least genetically altered, non-irradiated, plastic coated and non-siliconed, non-chemically impregnated items and food stuffs that you can reasonably afford? Regardless of your answer, you are alive and breathing today because your ancestors choose the equivalent latter choice and not the former concerning not only the food they ate, but their mate with whom they choose to pass on their genetic posterity, you! Those who chose to ignore such basic survival instincts, or who chose foolishly, or who dimwittedly chose not to choose at all, most likely became just more cannon fodder in the never-ending ongoing battle for genetic survival. It is not a matter of a crap shoot but more like a horse race or a marathon run-the strongest, and the fastest wins; and the winner wins the biggest or best prize: 2nd place and 3rd get less and so forth, but last placers not only don’t get a prize they lose their initial investment of effort they expended just for the chance to compete. Worst of all, those who choose not to compete or struggle at all are lower or worse than the losers who at least gain experience for the next heat or struggle, because they have forfeited all rights to survival and sealed their own genetic doom. Those individuals who choose to ignore basic biological survival programming in favor of a more altruistic approach have then their own agency to do so, but if someone believes that Altruism itself is superior to Natural Law rather than being a part of Nature or subject unto it, then they have a right to believe that, however, believing does not change the reality of what is. Just because someone chooses to ignore natural laws of reality in the interest of appearing benevolent, does not negate those same laws by which they are governed. Even if you believe you can fly, no matter how hard or honestly you believe it, if you jump out of a perfectly good airplane without a parachute, the overwhelming odds are that you will very soon become intimately acquainted with the law of GRAVITY-but only for a very brief instance.

Now as for what is willfully becoming obese, and what is beyond someone’s control? With the exception of small children and the mentally ill, if a sane person has a mouth, a hand, and a brain that controls both and they are obese, than they are so by their own will. What are things beyond your control? An airplane that falls out of the sky while you are asleep in your bed and burns your carcass to black and grey ash; or, while walking down the street some dirtbag terrorist detonates a truck load of ammonium nitrate next to your bus stop where you work and instantly vaporizes you into atoms; or the bridge you are driving over suddenly collapses; or you are born with no arms or legs and half a brain because your mother smoked crack while you were in her womb. We have no say in who our biological parents are or what genes we got from them, but as long as we have a functioning brain, we have a choice in how we respond to our genetic and environmental lot in life-everything else are just excuses. There are plenty of things in this world completely beyond our control, but becoming obese is hardly one of them.

In conclusion: Outward appearance is a reflection of part of the inner character. Even in our modern world people have to make judgments everyday just to survive(both financially and physically), from what type of career path to pursue, where or where not to pursue it, to what type of food to buy and consume, where to buy it, how much to exercise, where and how to exercise, where to live, who to trust their children with while working, where to send them to school or not, whether to take a taxi, the train or to drive, and so forth. These daily countless decisions or choices are usually made successfully to our own (and often others) benefit and well being when based upon good sound judgement. While appearance should not be the only desired factor used for making good judgements or assessments of any subject matter or character, it is often the only factor immediately available to our primary senses, and is usually the most revealing.