I always get asked about what I think about Brittany and what she does on the internet. She has written about her childhood, my vasectomy, her genitals, our kids, our sex life, and her body.
I am being honest when I say, at first I didn’t read any of it. It felt weird, and I get enough of her wit and insanity at home. Yes, she is exactly like this is in real life.
But, when she started taking on the whole body shape and weight thing, she sat me down to talk. She asked me if it was ok that she took this issue on, and explained what it meant to her, and for Gigi. I told her, of course, to do what she felt she had to do, and then she stopped me and said that if she was going to do it, she had to be honest with me first. She told me her pants size, her shirt size, and even let me watch as she stepped on the bathroom scale.
I could not understand why any of those numbers mattered to women because they meant nothing to me, in fact, I can’t recall a single one of them.
She wrote all these posts about how horrible people were to her about her weight, and some of the comments she got were terrible. I asked her why she kept doing this to herself, and she told be she had to take the bullet for all the other women.
Last September, I got to sit in the audience and watch Brittany give her TED talk. It was the first time I had ever had the chance to see her speak in public, and it was unreal. She wasn’t my wife on that stage, that for years would break down and cry looking in the mirror, refusing to get dressed in front of me. She was this gorgeous strong woman speaking to a packed house about her life and without even pausing, took her clothes off in front of 700 people like it was nothing.
Every woman in that theater wanted to be her that day, and when she walked into the audience after the break, people stood in line crying, waiting to thank her. She spoke to every single one of them, she listened to their stories and hugged them when they cried and everything I thought I knew about Brittany changed that day.
She still thinks she a lot funnier than she really is, and she is damn unstable, but she’s become an amazing advocate that is literally changing the world, and I get to be married to her for as long as she lets me.
