Too Thin, Too Heavy

"You could write horror novels about how the shidduch market judges girls' looks. I've never suffered from body-image complexes; I have a normal, healthy build. But the moment I started looking for a husband in Chicago, I felt like a slab of meat in a shop window.

One day a shadchanit called my mother after sending my photo to a boy's family. And do you know what she said? "The family found that Esther's cheeks look too round in this photo. They think she has a tendency toward being heavy, and the boy is looking exclusively for a slim girl. Let her go on a diet for a couple of months, and we'll redo the photo shoot." Instead of defending me, my mother frantically started putting me on a menu of nothing but salads. At other meetings, boys sized me up from head to toe, as if inspecting a horse's teeth before buying it. The system drills into girls that if you don't look like a cover model (while staying strictly within the bounds of Tzniut), your worth as a person is zero. It cripples the psyche of hundreds of girls, breeding anorexia and a terrible hatred of their own bodies."