Gloria Shuri Nava is, in her own words, overweight, and she has come in for some awful abuse due to the fact that her boyfriend , Ali, is “thin, fit and muscular.”
Gloria has now bravely decided to stand up and face the taunts and insults of bullies who abuse her everyday.
Gloria, who is 25-years-old and hails from San Jose, has been dating her 22-year-old beau for around 18 months, after they met online. However some people are still unable to comprehend why he would want to date her.
Gloria told Yahoo! , “We’ve been dating for 18 months and wherever we go – whether we’re walking hand in hand through the mall, airport, or down the street in his hometown (Glasgow, Scotland) or mine (San Jose, California) – we get confused looks that say, ‘He can do better than her!’”
However these looks are sometimes verbalised and Nava has admitted that people have shouted comments like, “Is he blind?” and “He’s only with you to get a green card.”
Whilst she has also been the victim of condescending thoughts such as, “It’s great he can see past your looks” and “He’s so nice for being with you.” However, Nava has admitted that she usually proclaims to these exclamations, “He’s not doing me a favor – he’s my boyfriend!”
Gloria has also comes in for abuse because of her comedic YouTube channel, Glowpinkstah, which has more than 250,000 subscribers.
She has admitted that cyber bullies have written, “She has a boyfriend? What is wrong with the world?” and “These two had sex?! Oh god, why?”
Ali and Gloria’s relationship developed organically online, after he noticed her work online. Gloria states, “Two-and-a-half years later, the miles and time zones between us hardly mattered. We were spending so many hours a week talking online. I thought Ali was cute too, but I figured someone like him wouldn’t have feelings for me.”
Plus she had her own worries, “And he was three years younger—I had dated so many immature guys and I wanted someone older. Meanwhile, Ali had just gotten out of a relationship, and did I really want to fall for someone who lived in Scotland?
However, after admitting their feelings for each other, they finally met in person and their relationship has continued to go from strength to strength, and Gloria has become more confident as a result, even starting a new collaborative video project called, The Beauty Adjustment.
Ali has since moved to California to get his PhD in clinical pshycology and they’re now closer than ever, even if the haters continue to persist in their mean, petty jeers.
Either way it doesn’t matter because as Gloria states, “Beauty and relationships come in all shapes and sizes : brown, yellow, short, tall, thin, fat—and one partner doesn’t have to mirror the other. Love is love. That’s a lesson that Ali taught me, and now I want to teach it to the rest of the world.”
What do you think of Gloria and Ali’s relationship?