Weight Isn't The Dealbreaker You Think It Is
70% of America is overweight, and most of those people are married--so why do so many people complain about their dating prospects being too fat?
If you spend a lot of time online listening to men talk about dating in 2026, you will see many of them repeat that overweight women are “ruining” the dating landscape. Even men who claim not to be picky will say they “don’t ask for much”—just someone who is “fit and active.” (Cue: the guy from Love Is Blind who repeatedly asked women if he would be able to lift them onto his shoulders at a concert.) Others will cut to the chase with “no fatties.” They will tweet out photos of women they apparently deem too heavy to be on the apps at all, with the same degree of shock and horror as one might feel if they had seen these women not on a dating app, but hiding in their shower with a knife.
Of course, the Internet is primed to show us rage bait, and I have long believed these men represented a particularly nasty vocal minority—not that it was unusual to prefer slim women, but that it was unusual to be so incensed that heavier women exist at all.
But something still didn’t add up. If over 70% of the country is overweight, and the vast majority of people get married, aren’t these men actually far pickier than the average guy, despite claiming to be “not that picky” or even on the incel spectrum? The average guy, after all, is fat, and is married to a fat woman. Even when I interviewed a group of non-misogynistic incels, most of them subtly mentioned they wouldn’t date an overweight woman. And what about women? Surely, if women are the choosier sex, they’re choosy about weight as well. So why do we never hear them complaining about “too many fat guys on the apps?”
Luckily, I had lots of data on this—not just from my recent digital body type rating survey, but from other studies I conducted earlier. Finally, I have an answer to the question of just how much a dealbreaker weight is for men and women, and the nuance that everyone seems to be missing.
