Food and Intimacy

What is your relationship with food telling you about your intimate relationships?

This is an excerpt from my book Want: 8 Steps to Recovering Desire, Passion, and Pleasure After Sexual Assault

Love as Nourishment

Food and love are inextricably linked. The association is old: when we are babies, food almost always comes alongside touch, with the closeness of a caregiver. Most babies quickly learn that when they cry, they generally get milk. We learn early on that food soothes. When we get older, food can become a replacement for love.

We all want to be nourished, both in our hearts and in our bellies. We all have a few relationship patterns we tend to repeat over and over, especially if we have a history of sexual abuse, stress in our families, or any number of things that can happen to us in an unhealthy society. We keep trying to repair some original hurt, and we take it out on our food and on our people, for better or for worse. These relationship patterns probably won’t change unless we can go to the source: our relationship with ourselves. Therapy, communicating with our partners, and journaling about our daddy issues can all be helpful, but if we keep teaching our nervous systems that we don’t deserve nourishing food in a calm environment, that we can’t have food when we’re hungry, or that we’ll keep stuffing our faces when our bodies say to stop, our nervous systems will not believe in the possibility of a truly nourishing love. That doesn’t mean we won’t have love or successful relationships, of course, but we might be making it a lot harder on ourselves than we need to. Feeding ourselves is a fundamental way of loving ourselves.

Food is generally easier to control than other people. Most of us have some choice about what and how we eat, but other human beings are unpredictable. Sexual violation makes us feel on a deep, unconscious level that we are not safe and that we can’t protect ourselves from something unwanted entering into our bodies. Re-learning to eat consciously with a loving intention can help teach our nervous systems that we do still have choices about what happens to our bodies. We can show our bodies through food that there are zones of safety that we do have some control over. We can practice boundaries, desire, pleasure, and presence every day by working on our relationship with what we put in our mouths. We can heal by playing with our food.

Practice: Love as Nourishment

Consider an intimate relationship. This could be a past or present romantic partner or someone else in your life that you are close with. If we consider that we learned to associate food and love as little children, how do our love/nourishment patterns manifest in our adult relationships? Does the way we eat mirror the way we love? Journal or reflect on the following questions: 

  • How do you consume love in your life? Do you nibble at it all day without really paying attention? Do you push it away? Hide it in cupboards and under the bed without eating it and then cling onto it until it withers in your white-knuckle grip? Do you gorge on junk, not really believing you can access the kind of nourishment that would feed you in the long term?

  • Do you feel nourished by your relationships? When you are hungry for attention, affection, or connection, do you trust you will be fed?

  • Can you access your love when you need it or do you have to starve until your other feels like offering it? 

  • Do you feel you can say no to your other or are you force-fed time, attention, affection, sex? 

  • Can you feed yourself with the love and connection you need outside of your primary relationship or do you rely on your other alone to feed you? 

  • Is love shared and enjoyed or is it a game of give-and-take-away? 

  • Does your other know how to feed themselves or do they rely on you to meet their needs? 

  • Do you feel abundant, full of love, time, and energy to offer to your person, or do you feel starving and exhausted, unable to share what you have? 

  • What could you do to feed yourself more outside your primary relationship so you have more to give inside it?

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Get Out: White Absolution and Toxic Masculinity