The were also asked to rate " warmth/trustworthiness (understanding, supportive, kind, good listener, sensitive, and considerate), attractiveness/vitality (sexy, nice body, attractive appearance, good lover, outgoing, and adventurous), and status/resources (successful, nice house, financially secure, dresses well, and good job"

and they were asked about how long they expected their relationship to last.

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For instance, the study found that overweight women perceived their relationships to be of lower quality, but their male partners did not.

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that's hard at any weight.

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PS. I'M EATING CHOCOLATE COVERED RAISINS RIGHT NOW! I have a feeling that you need to know that, for some reason.

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The editors can post whatever they want no matter how inane, offensive, generalizing, or just plain wrong it might be. Commenters cannot. This is THEIR site, not ours, and we're lucky our IP addresses are even allowed access.

we clear?

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Yes, people can be cruel to those who are overweight. Have jerks yelled out their window, calling me a "fat bitch" while I hoofed across a parking lot alone? Yes, they have. But no one's ever yelled at one of my boyfriends, "Hey, you're with a fat bitch." That could be hard for both parties. But if we look at the issue this way, shouldn't we also say it's harder to be friends with a fat person? No one's ever yelled at my friends when they're with me, or me with my friends.

Ugh. I don't know why these few comments rile me up like they do, but I do know I'm liking myself more and more as I grow up, and it has nothing to do with my relationships or my size. I hope everyone here feels that way, too.

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Would I call dating an overweight woman (or anyone that doesn't fit the default body type) "hard"? No. HOWEVER discrimination sucks (for lack of a better word) and it doesn't affect just the person who doesn't look the way society thinks they should. Someone who really loves their partner will recognize that the blame lies with the hateful idiots, not their bf/gf, and work through it. Their relationship will be stronger for it.

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Say you talk to, oh, say, ten people on the street and you ask them if they have ever heard of your favorite band. If all of them say, "No, I've never heard of your band," you can't realistically conclude that 100% of your state's population has never heard of that group. You have to ask more people to get a more realistic picture.

Let's say you poll more people--you ask 100 people. This time, two people are familiar with your favorite group. Does that mean that only 2% of your entire state has ever heard of this group? Probably not; again, you'll need to ask more people.

So let's say you conduct a poll, statewide, doing a random selection of households, so you reach a total of 5% of the state. In, say, South Dakota, this would only be about 35,000 people. Probably now you can start to develop a trend. If you randomly went to a second group of 35000 people, you might start to expect their responses to look similar--with some statistical variation--to the first group of 35000.

When you're polling a HUGE population of people, and you want to establish a decent trend, it makes sense to up your sample size. There are very very very very very very very many overweight people in relationships, in the USA alone. 57 is simply not enough to establish a solid trend for people in general.

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//joking

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I think a lot of men, if they aren't fucking you, see you as "one of the guys" or something. I don't know, but fat men making disparaging comments about women is one of my biggest pet peeves.

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/;)

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/jokes

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And therein lies the problem - what you say may be true of how the scientific community defines an 'accurate' study that can be extrapolated out, BUT who is deciding those parameters? And how do we know what his/her/their prejudices (conscious or unconscious) are?

Outside of the academic bubble, it seems obvious to me that there is no way that one group of 104 people can possibly give a representative idea of variations among millions of people all over the world and what their marriages are like!

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You have not lied, and I think that point needs to be emphasized way more than any stats.

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