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Before I began reporting my article on how weight-loss drugs change the dynamics in romantic relationships, I asked my editors: Could we veil the identities of the main characters?
In New York Times articles, names are rarely obscured. Truth, after all, is journalism’s highest value, and facts are a reporter’s currency. We usually want sources to be quoted on the record, standing behind what they say, because it creates accountability and builds trust with readers.
But I wanted to write about taboos. I wanted to explore a couple’s most private interactions. I wanted them to talk about sex. And their naked bodies. And their weight. And their domestic, everyday arguments and negotiations. The best version of this story, I imagined, would hold up a mirror to readers by showing one couple experiencing all the dynamic shifts — as well as the shame and the pride, the anger and the pleasure — that come with one partner’s extreme weight loss. To do so the subjects would have to agree to be as open as possible. They couldn’t worry about potential blowback on social media, or the gossip of neighbors and co-workers. They needed to feel unconstrained.
Understanding these circumstances, my editors said yes.
I write about health because I’m interested in how people navigate toward their best selves in an arena where perfection is unattainable. For more than a year, I have been reporting on the ways that weight-loss drugs like Ozempic affect identity. In 2023, I published a profile of a 15-year-old girl, one of the first teenagers to be prescribed a GLP-1 agonist for weight loss. Then I wrote about Virginia Sole-Smith, a “fat activist” whose newsletter and books decrying Americans’ obsession with thinness found an audience just as Ozempic was going mainstream.
But it was my article about the popularity of breast reductions that focused a few questions in my mind: What does it mean to encounter the world as the same person, but in an altered body? What does it mean to absorb all those new signals — approving, curious, flirtatious — and come home to a partner who preferred things the way they were?
Breast reduction can be a meaningful but relatively minor change compared to the loss of 60 or 70 pounds. How can one person undergo a dramatic physical transformation without also transforming a marriage?
I pitched the article to my editors on the Well desk. Coincidentally, an editor at The New York Times Magazine, who in her personal life was observing friends on weight-loss drugs renegotiating mealtimes, grocery shopping, drinking and sex with their partners, reached out and suggested the same story. Editors like to say that the best stories are found in your text messages. This felt like kismet: Here was an idea in the ether that had not yet been reported. With one in eight Americans saying they’ve tried weight-loss drugs, relationships must be shifting everywhere.
The challenge was finding the right couple. At The Times, we sometimes publish “callouts” as a way to elicit stories from readers. Nearly 60 people responded to one I shared about weight-loss drugs and relationships.
Couples wrote about the secrecy surrounding the medication. Many people still regard weight-loss drugs as “the easy way out,” and couples don’t want to become a target for judgment. One couple in California described traveling out of town for their injections, telling no one, not even their adult son. Many also wrote about their sex lives. One woman said she loved her new body, but the nausea associated with the drugs made her disinclined toward sex. Another said she was feeling friskier in her 20-year marriage, initiating sex more often.
I spent about a week speaking with roughly half the qualifying respondents, mostly by phone. It was a little like casting a documentary. The people had to be relatable — their particular experience reflecting a wide, complex phenomenon — as well as self-reflective. Both partners also had to agree to open their lives up in a way that many people would find intrusive.
When I met Jeanne and Javier on a video call, I knew I’d found the right couple. They initially appeared a little stiff. Jeanne, especially, wore an air of, “What have you gotten us into now?” But about 20 minutes into our conversation, Jeanne, who has lost 60 pounds on Zepbound, described how it felt to be out in public as a couple when she was in a bigger body and how it feels now. Javier was shaken. He hadn’t known.
“You guys are amazing,” I said at the time.
I spoke to them, together and separately, in person and on video calls, for more than seven hours over a period of several weeks. They thoughtfully answered all my excruciatingly personal questions, pondering their own hurts, shames and motivations, and puzzling, in real time, over how and whether they could incorporate the reality of Jeanne’s new body, and everything they both want, into their marriage. They asked that we use their middle names to protect their privacy, so that they would not be Googleable and so that Jeanne would not suffer consequences at work.
Since the article was published, my email inbox has been overflowing with experiences similar to those Jeanne and Javier shared. All the credit goes to them, who trusted me with their very complicated, and not entirely resolved, love story.