A blog post by Pepetoe.

The Thing No One Warns You About In Recovery

Falling in love, again and again, wasn’t something anyone prepared me for. When people talk about recovery from an eating disorder, the focus is usually on the visible things: weight restoration, fear foods, clothes fitting differently, the shock of seeing your body change. Sometimes there’s space for the emotional side too. But rarely does anyone talk about how strange it is to suddenly have room for other people again.

Recovery doesn’t just give you food back. It gives you time. It gives you energy. It gives you headspace. And when you’ve spent so long with every thought orbiting around food, exercise, and control, that space can feel unfamiliar, even unsettling. Suddenly there’s capacity for connection again, and that can be just as overwhelming as it is hopeful.

Who I Was Before Everything Shrunk

Before my eating disorder, I was always the one in my friendship group who gravitated towards connection, or rather validation. At school, I was the girl who talked to boys, who went on dates, who always seemed to have a crush or a boyfriend or a situationship forming. I liked people. I liked closeness. I liked that part of myself, and back then it didn’t feel fragile or performative. It was just who I was. Maybe it was the weight of expectations? But that’s something to explore another time.

When my eating disorder arrived, that version of me didn’t disappear overnight. It faded quietly, as everything else in my life began to shrink. My world narrowed. My focus tightened. The things that once felt natural started to feel irrelevant, then impossible. Connection slowly stopped fitting inside the rules I was living by.

By the time I went to uni, there was still an expectation hanging over me, from other people, but also from myself, that I’d fall straight back into that role. That I’d flirt on nights out, hook up, date around, be social and desirable in the way I used to be. On the outside, I probably looked like I should still be that girl. And I was for a short while.

But my head couldn’t keep up.

When you’re deep in an eating disorder, there genuinely isn’t room for anyone else. Your brain is consumed by food, numbers, movement, rules, guilt, and control. Even when you’re surrounded by people, you’re somewhere else entirely. I couldn’t think about romance or intimacy or connection when my mind was stuck in survival mode. There was no curiosity left, no emotional availability, no softness. That part of my life quietly fell away too, and I didn’t fully understand the loss until I started trying to recover.

The Quiet Grief of Feeling “Behind”

Early recovery came with a kind of grief I didn’t expect. I remember looking around and feeling behind in a way I couldn’t quite put into words. Within a couple of months of each other, both my brother and my twin sister got into really wonderful relationships. I was genuinely happy for them, but I also felt stuck, kind of like they’d stepped onto something moving while I was standing still.

It wasn’t jealousy. It was mourning.

Mourning the years my eating disorder had taken from me. Mourning how far away love suddenly felt. Mourning the ease with which everyone else seemed to move through milestones I felt I’d missed. It felt as though they’d won the lottery of timing and emotional readiness, while I was staring down the reality that I still had so much internal work to do just to feel okay in my own body.

Learning the Hard Way in Early Recovery

Looking back, it makes sense that my first relationship in recovery wasn’t a healthy one. I was vulnerable, unsure, and desperate to feel chosen in a body I didn’t yet trust. I thought (maybe unfairly, and maybe that’s on me) that someone else might help teach me how to love myself, or at least make that gap feel slightly less.

Instead, I found myself in something toxic and controlling. He was afraid of my weight gain, afraid of my body changing, asking whether it would change my face shape, saying he wanted me to stay as I was. At the time, I mistook that fear for care. I thought that was what love looked like.

Now I can see how closely it mirrored my eating disorder: conditional, anxious, obsessed with control. I stayed in that relationship for eighteen months, slowly shrinking myself emotionally to keep the peace. And when I finally found the courage to leave, I relapsed shortly after. Losing that relationship felt like losing control all over again.

The Belief That Love Has to Be Earned

For a long time, my eating disorder convinced me that no one would love me unless I was skinny. That belief seeped into every relationship I entered. Love felt conditional, like something I had to earn through performance.

I felt like I had to be flawless to be wanted. Never seen without makeup. Always training. Always “good”. Always shrinking. Before relationships, during them, and after them. My body wasn’t something I lived in; it was something I managed for other people’s approval.

Letting Yourself Be Seen Again

That’s why intimacy after an eating disorder feels uniquely exposing. You’re asking yourself to let someone see your body after years of hating it, controlling it, punishing it. To lie next to someone, without hiding, without performing, can feel terrifying.

And yet, when someone looks at you and tells you you’re beautiful, and you can feel that they mean it, without conditions or fear, it can be deeply powerful. Not because it replaces self-love, but because it supports it. Learning to trust yourself takes time. Learning to feel safe in your body takes time. Finding people who help build that gently, without pressure, is something worth protecting.

When Vulnerability Meets Trauma

I won’t pretend this is easy. Letting yourself be that visible is hard enough without also carrying trauma, without having had your boundaries crossed, without men taking things from you that you can never get back. That fear doesn’t vanish just because you’re in recovery, or because you’re in a more stable and healthy relationship. It lingers, shaping how safe intimacy feels, how close you can get, how slowly you need to move.

And that slowness is allowed.

Vulnerability doesn’t mean you owe anyone access to you. It means choosing, carefully, who gets to see you.

The Space Recovery Gives You

This is the part of recovery that rarely gets named. Getting better doesn’t just change how you eat, it changes how much room you have for life. For people. For connection. For love, in all its forms.

Learning to hold that space again can feel just as daunting as it is hopeful. If you’re in recovery and relationships feel confusing, distant, or overwhelming, you’re not broken. You didn’t miss your chance. You weren’t failing.

You were surviving.

And now, slowly, you’re learning how to live again.

Xo Pepetoe