
What I find as a plus-size woman is that a lot of men approach me with the expectation that I have lower standards. Eat the way you eat, dress the way you dress, speak the way you speak-just ensure that you’re being true to yourself. I think it’s important to not allow that to influence you in dating. It seems easy enough, but for a lot of women, they feel like they have to play a role in order to be desirable.

We caught up with Quani during a recent photo shoot to see if there was anything she could teach us about dating from her in-the-field research and years of “singleness” coaching. She decided it was time for plus-size women to become the heroines of their own stories, so she set to writing The Dating Chronicles of a Fat Bougie Chick, a novel she hopes to finish up by March. Life coach and dating expert Quani Boyd has always been a big reader, but she never felt like she could see herself in the stories she read.