This essay is part of a Modern Love project on the intersection of money and relationships.

We were standing outside a party in Texas when the cat came up to us. The party was for my boyfriend, Matty Davis, an artist, dancer and choreographer who had performed at the Dallas Contemporary earlier that evening. Our party’s host, a curator from the museum, told us that the cat belonged to some teens down the street who were often too stoned to feed it, but it had ingratiated itself up and down the block and was fed, collectively, by the whole neighborhood.

Matty admired this animal, and he crouched down, nearly flattening himself on the ground, to pet it. It meowed suggestively and he fed it hors d’oeuvres from a plate in his hand.

“I like an outdoor cat much more than an indoor cat. They have a greater spirit,” he said with respect and, I sensed, some recognition. He, like this cat, was adept and self-possessed, and the two could be similarly understood as beings who roamed, detached and free, in search of fullness.

I tried to kneel beside my boyfriend. I, too, wanted to pet the cat. My hips were too stiff. They ached and throbbed. I stayed standing, watching Matty and the cat sprawl in the yard, and felt, not for the first time, a particular fear. The fear was not born of the physical pain I felt. That pain was expected. The fear was what my pain might someday mean for Matty.

A few years ago, I’d gone to see an orthopedic surgeon, hoping for new hips. I have a disability that includes, among other things, hip dysplasia, the mismatch of my ball and socket joints. In the months before, I’d noticed a significant increase in pain and decrease in my mobility. I’d wanted a hip replacement as I thought it might assuage these concerns but, looking at my X-rays, the surgeon told me what I’d heard my whole life: I was not a good candidate for the procedure. My hip issues were too structural. The pain I felt would get worse, a little or a lot each year.

“He will have to learn to help you,” the surgeon said, gesturing toward my young son, who sat beside me. And, the doctor wanted to know, was I married?

I was, at that time, married to my son’s father. We’d been together over a decade and while I had not always been certain about our compatibility, I had always believed in our ability to endure difficulty together. And now my surgeon was letting me know of the immense physical difficulties that lie ahead for me. There was little to do. I’d continue to lose mobility. Physical therapy could help and so could pain medications, but the thing I’d need the most was care, physical and financial.

“My best advice to you,” my surgeon said, “is to stay married.”

I did not stay married, but I tried. I was unhappy, but I was also overcome with the fear of aging alone. If I left my husband, who would take care of me? My doctor’s words echoed in my mind. Was it unfair to stay with someone out of a need that was not love? It was. But I could not envision a life without my husband’s help, and so I planned to stay until he left — which, eventually, he did.

Shortly after my separation, I met Matty. We fell in love with speed and certainty. Whatever a soul mate is, I’d found mine. But he prompts in me a new kind of unhappiness, the inverse of what I felt with my ex-husband. As a dancer and multisport athlete, Matty is the most physically powerful, agile and active person I’ve ever met. He’s animated by a desire to be out in the world, racing to the top of a mountain or leaping into the sea.

I’m afraid of what he might lose in loving me, caring for me as my body breaks down. This fear has manifested in me as a desire for control, and my only major avenue for control in our shared life is money. I find myself paying for things with the aim to create an imbalance, which might obligate Matty, a man of serious integrity, to care for me. Every time I pay a bill, I do so not from a place of generosity, but from a selfish, weak and deeply fearful desire to trap him.

The morning after the party, over breakfast, my mother — who had traveled with us to Dallas to see Matty dance — asked him about being free and alone. His performance explores the nuances of caregiving, from the joy and tenderness it can engender to its more stifling and challenging aspects. Matty dances with his collaborator, Ben Gould, and the two men are often locked together — supporting, stabilizing, carrying each other’s weight. Their partnering work is made more specific and intricate by Ben’s Tourette’s, a syndrome that causes him to make sudden, repetitive, and uncontrollable movements and sounds.

At times, both dancers lifted themselves using only an elbow, wrist, knee, toe, and you could feel in your own body, empathetically, the pain that comes from holding so much weight on so small a point. Seeing this, my mother had wept silently beside me. My stepfather had recently died. He’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s seven years ago and my mother had cared for him until the end, applying her steadfast and resolute Midwestern work ethic to the labor of long-term caregiving, which fell entirely on her.

There was much she’s not been able to say about the personal cost of those years of care, much she would deny out of love. But as I watched her watching Matty, I knew she was seeing a representation of that dire cost.

At breakfast, she asked Matty about the moments in the performance where he broke free from Ben and moved his body across the stage alone. How did those moments of freedom feel? she asked. “Amazing,” he said, smiling. “I feel like the cat outside at night.”

I excused myself from the table, went to the bathroom, hid in a stall, and I cried for what felt like a long time. When I returned, I made a show of paying the check for breakfast, adamantly rejecting Matty’s offer to contribute. I could see this made Matty a bit uncomfortable, which was how I wanted him to feel. The more he fretted about reciprocity in our relationship, the safer I felt.

My twisted logic told me that the more I gave Matty now, the more I could ask of him later, and there will, inevitably, come a time when I will need to ask for so much more help. It will be hard to ask for and, often, hard for Matty to give. My son, too, will suffer as I suffered watching my mother, my heart torn with worry for all she endured. Less often do I, to my detriment, reflect on what she gained by loving my stepfather through the end of his life. I forget that the cat outside at night is fed by a community of loving others.

Worse, I failed to see that Matty’s performance explores care as a kind of fullness itself, a fullness that can come only from being inextricably bound to another person. A strong bond can hold freedom alongside responsibility, sacrifice, care. I can’t change the facts of my body, but I can change what I notice. I can stop conflating control over my future with control over the people I love. I try, with Matty, to feel the following truth: that all the inevitable worry, difficulty and even the resentment — it is all the product of love, an emotion big enough and strong enough to hold the others without breaking.

Later, back home in Brooklyn, Matty, my son and I attended someone else’s dance performance, which we felt was mostly about nothing. The work was polite, easy to watch, and we left unchanged. An artwork so free from effort had nothing to offer us. Why was it so hard for me transfer this observation to my relationship? I posed this question to Matty, voicing to him my many fears. He listened with great patience and then said, “Without awareness, without the willingness to confront the facts of our aging and changing bodies, without effort, love is an empty concept.”

Matty’s performance had been brutal, grueling and even challenging at times to witness. But the faces in Matty’s audience displayed deep feeling and, for my mother, the work had prompted a truth about care that was inaccessible through language, a truth that had to be felt to be perceived. In Dallas, I’d sat between my son and my mother, and I held their hands and together we watched Matty dance, and we left transformed, and we were grateful for Matty for offering us through his art such a hard-earned gift.

And what do I have to offer him? As I write this, Matty enters my office. He knows he’s the subject of my essay.

“What are you saying?” he asks.

“That I’m afraid.”

“I will take care of you,” he says.

“But it will become very hard.”

And to this he can only nod and say, “I love you.”

And I can only I say it back and then let him take me out and buy my dinner.

Chloé Cooper Jones is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author of the memoir “Easy Beauty.”

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