A Major Change of Heart

From Radical haircuts to drastic surgery Britons have an appetite for major makeovers. The nation will spend almost £659 million on cosmetic surgery this year according market researchers Mintel. This figure doesn’t even stretch to haircuts, clothes and non surgical weight loss plans. Looking good is big business but altering our appearance or weight drastically can have repercussions on our relationships..............
Susan Lane, 24, Manchester

Susan has a gastric bypass from SurgiCare a cosmetic surgery specialist in Manchester. She lost 32kg (5st0 and went from a size 22 to a size 12 in four months. `Before the surgery, I was really horrible to my boyfriend. I was really fed up with my weight and I’d get angry with him if he said I looked nice.

‘If we were going out, I’d take ages, empty my wardrobe and cry my eyes out because I didn’t know what to wear. He’d say he liked what I had on but I felt that he was lying just to get me out the door. Now, I get ready really fast and just out anything on. We’ve swapped roles. He’s the one who’s paranoid about whether he’s too fat and I have to reassure him that he looks fine.’

Insecurity in our partners is something that Kathleen Charlotte warns to prepare for, as a change in image could come with a change in personality, too. ‘it is entirely possible for someone to change on quite a deep level as our personalities are not fixed for our entire adult lives and it is natural, in such a case, for the other person to worry about that they’ll be cast out with the baggy cloths’

It’s unsettling enough to deal with the physical change of being intimate with someone whose body shape isn’t the one we are familiar with, says Charlotte, but pair that with the feeling that our partner has become someone else and we can head into scary territory. We’re in a relationship with a stranger.
‘We tend to choose mates who are similar to us in looks, background, social status , class and wealth’, says Charlotte ‘If our mate then becomes much better-looking there is no longer that symmetry there, an imbalance occurs, and this leads to insecurity.

We may cover our discomfort by calling our changed partner vain or shallow but, in reality, we’re scared that we’ve lost the person that we fell in love with. And, quite frankly, we have. It’s just a matter of whether we can fall in love with the new person. Plus, of course, there’s the issue of whether this new person will love us back.