The TLC docu-series My 600-lb Life chronicles the life of Brianne, a young woman who weighs more than 700 lbs. In the Season 7 episode “Brianne’s Story,” Brianne says she had a normal childhood until her father who was in the Air Force started to spend more time at home and her parents had their second and third child within one year. Brianne cries and she reveals: “My dad and I didn’t really get along, and I always felt like he didn’t love me, that he loved my brother and sister more than me.”
On the show, Brianne takes on the challenge of losing weight so she can save her own life with bypass gastric surgery. But her fragile progress is turned upside-down when her husband, who’s reportedly “old enough to be her father by several years,” suffers a heart attack. He says, “I need her more than she knows,” and with tears in his eyes says, “I want her to be happy. I want her to lose weight.”
Psychology Today recently featured a study of age gap relationships (AGRs), which investigates whether it’s true that young women in AGRs seek out father figures for psychological reasons because they have maladaptive relationships with their fathers. But according to the findings of the study, “the younger woman-older man relationship has no unique psychological qualities” and that “the age gap alone is not sufficient to predict who will be happiest with whom.” New episodes of My 600-lb Life air Wednesdays at 8pm on TLC.
