Q: Recently, I read your response to the man with the fat wife. What intrigued me was your assertion that this man probably could learn to see past his wife's weight and be able to regain intimacy with her. Now, I could understand maintaining my love for her, but intimacy? ... How does one achieve this? Can you possibly recommend some reading material regarding this matter? -- L.L., Las Vegas

A: I was happily shocked, L.L., by the number of men who wrote similar letters. This discussion compels me. Fascinates me. I've decided to dig a little deeper than usual. I only have 750 words each Tuesday, so that means you're going to have to be patient with me getting to your actual question. What was an answer to one man's letter is now officially a column series.

Happily shocked? Yep. Most men don't take their marriage vows lightly, despite the common cultural prejudice that men are shallow about matters of love, sex and romance.

It feels important to reiterate and clarify a few things from the column you mention. I said:

"Can (a man) learn to see past (his) wife's weight gain, to eroticize intimacy and find a new and deeper way to desire her? Maybe. Probably. Does the average American male need to do some serious growing up about this? Absolutely. But a different question is, can you learn to see past what the weight gain means? Depends on what it means. Maybe not. And maybe you shouldn't."

My contention is (and remains) that, if our spouse (husband or wife) is engaged in a behavior grounded in the loss of self-respect, the loss of willingness to engage life with vitality and intention, a behavior indicative of deeper crisis, a behavior indicative of deliberately distancing the marriage, or worse, an obviously self-destructive behavior, then "learning to see past" the behavior is inappropriate. It is an invitation to participate in the pathology, as we say in my field.

The answer to that invitation is always, "No, thank you." We don't abandon our spouse and the marriage. We confront the behavior. We say, "This behavior is not OK."

The same response would be required, frankly, if our spouse became bulimic or anorexic. Those behaviors aren't OK either.

Obesity is a medical problem, and in most cases a problem connected to psycho-emotional malaise like that described above.

Next, let me say that I simply reject the idea that, if it is true love, then looks don't matter. Equally absurd is the reflexive prejudice about men: If a man no longer feels erotically attracted to his wife because she has gained 50 pounds, that man must be shallow.

Ridiculous.

Male sexuality is more neurologically wired optically -- provoked (at least initially) by what he sees. Female sexuality includes the biological drive to "be seen." If you're interested in such things, recent research observes these same behaviors in our closest genetic cousins, chimpanzees. We can insist a man hate himself for this (isn't that sexist?), but it isn't going to change. It's just a fact.

Yet, two other things are also true:

1. For a man, the bonds of love and sexuality are not only made up of what he sees. For a healthy man, it never would be enough. I have more than once been initially attracted to a woman I thought (and still think) is drop-dead take-your-breath-away beautiful, sexy, etc., only to find myself perplexed a few minutes or a few days later by how paradoxically "unattracted" I was to her. Something else was missing, even if I could never quite put it into concrete terms.

2. What a man decides "looks" erotically desirable is only partly innate. Back to the chimp research, for example. The first females to mate with the strongest males have the more symmetrical faces. The most desirable females are fit and healthy. But for human males, the much larger part of what we "like" to look at is programmed, as it were, by culture. Middle Eastern men, for example, regularly describe our supermodels as "underfed" and "scrawny." A reader alerted me last week to a PBS special about a Slavic culture where men desire very large women. These men insist women risk their health in obesity the same way many American men insist women risk their health with extreme dieting and cosmetic surgery. I maintain what I said last Tuesday: Modern American men have been programmed with an image of desirability that ranges from cruelly unrealistic to pure fiction.

But the good news is, if a man's erotic attractions are more programmed than innate .. then we do have some real capacity to be reprogrammed, to rewire how we make bonds with women that generate authentic sexual desire.

More next week.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling and Wellness Center in Las Vegas. His columns appear on Tuesdays and Sundays. Questions can be e-mailed to skalas@reviewjournal.com.