This essay is part of a Modern Love project about the intersection between money and relationships.
In my mid-twenties, I was on the brink of bankruptcy. It’s not that I had a hard time paying the electricity bill at the end of the month, but that I was constantly doing numbers in my head to make sure I could afford the money. I was carrying a large debt that I had been transferring from one credit card to another for years. My annual income was less than $20,000. In therapy (the cost of which caused me additional consternation), I talked a lot about the whisper of anxiety that accompanied me every day, the fear that my financial insecurity was a symptom that I was doing something wrong.
At that time I had a boyfriend, a kind person. He wasn’t the last man she would date, but almost. He worked long hours as a television editor; He wasn’t rich, but he was debt-free and he earned what then seemed to me like a king’s loot: something like $1,000 a week. He was the first romantic partner I lived with and the first whose income more than tripled mine. When we moved into our small one-bedroom, we suggested an equitable scale to pay our daily expenses in which I contributed about a third. I don’t believe the word equitable was still part of my vocabulary, but we both knew I could never have afforded a percentage egalitarian.
I appreciated his generosity, but felt very uncomfortable about the arrangement. Every month when I wrote him a check, my body was filled with a potent combination of shame and fear. Even though my rational side understood that our agreement was fair, I still felt like a failure. I was terrified by the idea of dependency, which seemed to me like a sinister door.
I have worked since my parents, both working class, got me my first work permit at age 14. I came to understand financial independence as freedom. As a teenager when I moved out of my childhood home, I rejected my parents’ help because I knew it allowed them to have a say in my way of living. During my twenties I spent several years as a sex worker, an experience that confirmed my suspicion that there was no such thing as free money.
I had been clean and sober for three years when my boyfriend and I moved in together, but even at my lowest point in addiction, I had been obsessively self-sufficient. It didn’t matter how messy my life was. I always I would get money to pay the rent. But at 26 years old, a student and unpublished writer, she had a large debt for the first time. She would later understand that it was the usual situation for most budding artists who do not come from wealthy families.
In our second year of living together, my boyfriend offered to pay off my credit card debt. My payments barely reached the amount of the initial debt, he noted. I nodded, but felt the blood drain from my face.
“That’s very generous,” I said. “But that idea makes me feel…uncomfortable.” That was saying something. She felt like vomiting.
“You can consider it a loan, if you want,” he replied.
During the years we lived together, I started cooking more. I liked to cook and, as a girl with Puerto Rican and Italian grandmothers, I had been raised to enjoy feeding people. I don’t know when I started washing her clothes, but it soon became a routine.
“It’s a little strange that you do all this,” he once told me. I downplayed it. “It’s okay,” I told him. “I’m home more often than you.” And in a way was good. Folding clothes was easier than writing.
It wasn’t just in our house that things got weird. I covered my tattoos in front of her parents. I certainly didn’t tell them I was writing a book about my years as an addict and sex worker; In fact, I didn’t tell almost anyone. Gather a great collection of sweaters. My life started to look like some kind of costume. I have never looked so conventional. me too never He had neither asked for nor accepted financial help.
In our third year together, he and I started talking about having a child and getting married. Although these possibilities excited me in some ways, they also filled me with trepidation. How had she gone from a dominatrix who mostly dated women to a boring teacher who lived with a man in an apartment she couldn’t afford? At what point did dressing up stop being a game and become my real life?
What happened was exactly what I should have expected: I fell in love with a woman and I left him. The breakup was agony, compounded by the fact of her generosity and my inability to return it. Out of guilt, I attended a few weeks of couples therapy with him after the breakup and left behind most of the belongings we shared. After a few months, however, I got rid of those sweaters and got new tattoos. Then, I published that book about everything I had learned to hide.
When I reflected on our relationship, I recoiled from my dismay and bewilderment, and resorted to self-loathing, which seemed safer. What the hell had possessed me? The patriarchy, decided: I had entered the old theater of heterosexuality and had found myself pigeonholed, with dirty clothes, dishes and sweaters.
The story could have ended there. I stayed with that woman—whom I still call “my best ex”—for three years. Then I fell in love with another woman. Although I was no longer so broke, she had an income level that was still very distant from mine. She was prone to grand gestures and expensive gifts: she bought me plane tickets, massages, expensive meals, Gucci jewelry and sunglasses. I was stunned by this generosity, and even more so by my consent.
“I want to take care of you,” he often told me. Every time she said those words, I felt a flash of fear. Look what happened the last time I let someone take care of me! But behind that fear there was something else. I felt enthralled. He was ravenously hungry. To my surprise, I discovered that I desperately wanted to be taken care of.
For a time, the narcotic effect of his grand gestures of care obscured the reality of our dynamic: it was the most unstable I had ever known. We fought often. I was obsessed with our relationship, to the exclusion of almost everything else in my life.
And yet, once again I strove to become the good wife, performing mundane administrative tasks on his behalf, carrying his coat at public events, and making myself smaller to avoid conflict.
When I left her, my life was in ruins. I had distanced myself from friends and family. And I had become a stranger to myself again. But I also opened my eyes: I saw that the common denominator between those two relationships had not been gender or sexual orientation, or even economic difference. It had been me.
The same quality that had made me so proud—my need to control my own independence, my inability to accept help gracefully—had created an imbalance in me. I couldn’t accept healthy support from a lover and I dove headlong into a twisted dynamic with another partner.
Later, I came to see the relationship with my television editor boyfriend with more nuances. I had spent the years before our relationship as some kind of career criminal, prepared for trial, violence, arrest, and humiliation. I had always had a job, of course, but my life had become precarious and vulnerable in all the ways it can be for an addict and sex worker. I would have been ashamed to admit it at the time, but there was comfort in just the ordinary style of my life with him. I didn’t blame myself for craving that comfort, but for refusing to acknowledge it.
At times, it had also been tempting to reduce the story of that tumultuous relationship with the woman who wanted to take care of me into a digestible story: I had been a genius of control. Or perhaps we had both been temporarily possessed by a toxic chemistry. Beyond the partial truths contained in those explanations, I knew that it had been that voracious hunger for care—caused by my unconditional rejection of care throughout my life—that had made me return to it again and again. I also knew that there was only one person who could make me capable of loving in a more balanced way: me.
As I have matured, the comfort of blaming someone or something else for my hardships has become rare. I try to take responsibility with more tenderness than recrimination. When I become a stranger to myself, the explanation is always complicated.
The years that have passed have taught me to give and receive all types of resources, including money, in the best way. My wife and I are pretty good at not taking our problems to that particular level. Neither of us craves the kind of care one should only expect from a father or a god, and we both know how to ask for help when we need it. We are just two adults, each responsible for herself, who choose to live together every day. It may be a lot more work, but in the end it costs us less.
Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including Childhoodwinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and professor at the University of Iowa.
