Melinda French Gates talked about getting into a toxic relationship that left a lasting impact on her psyche, in college. Bill Gates’s former wife in a new interview admitted that it wasn’t a positive relationship for her and it took several years to get over the impact of her college romance.
Melinda said her boyfriend who she met at the Duke University commented a lot on her looks which affected her body image and confidence, so much so that she felt its impact throughout her twenties and thirties.
“[It] was really not a positive relationship for me at all,” she said in Monday’s episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show.
“He cared a lot about how I looked and said a lot of things about it to me, and that really is not OK. It really is not.”
By the time Gates got out of the relationship, she said, she had already “inculcated too many of those messages.”
“I would say that carried through with me into my 20s and even into my 30s,” she said. “And it wasn’t, probably, until I got to 40 that I got more OK with who I was.”
At 60, Gates is clear about her fitness goals.
“I want to be fit because I wanna be able to do all the things I want,” she said. “I want to be healthy, but I’m not so focused on, you know, am I X weight or Y weight or do I fit in that size pants or another?”
However, she admitted that her body image issues are “still there in the back of my head a little bit, but it just isn’t a big call anymore.” Gates said she overcame her body image issues by consulting “several different nutritionists” and a therapist to understand the ‘anxiety’ around her body better.
She said that when you release yourself from a sense of “perfectionism around weight and body image,” you have so much more mind space and peace.
What inspired her more to work on her body image issues, was also the well-being of her daughters – Jennifer, 28, and Phoebe, 22. The doting mother wanted to teach them the importance of self-love.
“I also got to a point where I realized that I was role modeling for my daughters,” she said. “It was really important that I work on this in myself so I didn’t put any of that on them and so when they had body issues, they could come to me and I could be honest with them.”
Gates said her work also helped heal her relationship with her body.
“Data shows that if women are working and doing meaningful work, they focus less on body image,” she shared, “which, again, how beautiful is it to be able to put that energy and that time into things that you care about doing for the world?”
After graduation, Melinda started working and soon met Bill Gates, her former husband, in 1987 at a Microsoft sales meeting. Melinda had joined Microsoft as a product manager, while Bill was the CEO at the time. The couple got married in 1994.
They parted ways in 2021 after 27 years of marriage and the co-founder of Microsoft in a recent interview described it as the ‘biggest regret’ of his life. Melinda however felt that the split was necessary.
Melinda in her upcoming memoir The Next Day has talked in detail about her decision to separate with Bill Gates and navigating through other significant transitions in her life.
