Fitness life or fatness life: the dilemma of the couple as a project

Why some people regret choosing the comfortable life with their partner

What weighs more in a relationship decision: a shared future project or the comfort of the present? Nine and a half years after choosing a woman who offered him financial stability and roots, a man wonders whether he should have taken the harder path instead: an international relationship that would have demanded work, moving abroad and family. The metaphor he uses is that of the fitness life — the discipline that builds something — versus the fatness life — the comfort that ends in one huge ball of regret.

The fitness/fatness dichotomy in relationships
The author of the story, who frames his tale through a sporting metaphor, distinguishes between two models of life as a couple: one that demands getting active, finding hard work and emigrating to build a project alongside a foreign woman; another that settles for what the surroundings offer, accepting help from his in-laws. His decision, made almost a decade ago, was to go with the option he calls fatness: a Spanish partner who provides him with a salary of 2,000 euros a month — allegedly from his father-in-law — and a life without major upheavals. Now, however, he feels that lost time cannot be recovered and that security has become a trap.

The price of comfort: dependence and lack of purpose
The analyses circulating around this case suggest that the real condemnation was not the choice itself, but the use of the partner as a vehicle to obtain a lifestyle. One of the sharpest comments points out: "The mistake was not choosing between a Croatian woman and a woman from Murcia. It was treating both as vehicles to obtain a life." Financial dependence, far from liberating, has generated a feeling of emptiness that the protagonist describes as "being dead while alive." His partner, whom he calls a "premium slacker," sat a C2 civil service exam (a Spanish public administration exam) after studying one hour a day for three months and scored 38 out of 100: a figure that illustrates the lack of shared ambition. The consequence is that he is forced to wait for his father-in-law's inheritance as his only way out, while his own initiative fades away.

The lessons of the road not taken
Most of the reflections agree that the current regret is a mirage: the other option would have had its problems too. "If you had gone off with the other one, you'd be complaining all the same," sums up one of the most pragmatic voices. The longing for the Croatian woman, they say, is really a longing for youth and for the illusion that everything would turn out well. The underlying problem is not the choice of partner, but the attitude: whoever sees the other person as an instrument to cover their shortcomings, whether money or purpose, will end up just as dissatisfied. The true fitness life, they argue, does not depend on who you pair up with, but on what you are willing to build for yourself.

The sarracena of the story is not exactly uplifting, but it carries an uncomfortable grain of truth: in the end, perhaps the only sensible choice is not to turn your partner into an instrument to patch up your own shortcomings. Because if you do, it doesn't matter whether you choose adventure or comfort; you will end up looking back and wondering what might have been. And that question, you know, has no answer.