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

In my mid-20s, I was close to broke. Not struggling-to-keep-the-lights-on-broke, but constantly-doing-basic-math-in-my-head-broke. I had some lingering bad debt that I’d been transferring between credit cards for years. My yearly income was under $20,000. In therapy (the cost of which caused additional consternation), I talked a lot about the low hum of anxiety that attended my days, the fear that my financial insecurity was evidence that I was doing something wrong.

I had a boyfriend at the time, a kind person. He wasn’t the last man I would ever date, but close to it. He worked long hours as a TV editor; he wasn’t rich, but had no debt and earned what seemed to me then like a king’s ransom: something like a grand a week. He was the first romantic partner I’d ever lived with and the first whose income was more than triple mine. When we moved into our small one-bedroom, he suggested an equitable scale for paying our living expenses in which I contributed about a third. I don’t think the word equitable was yet a part of my vocabulary, but we both knew I could never have afforded an equal share.

I was grateful for his generosity, but deeply uneasy about the arrangement. Every month, when I wrote him a check, my body coursed with a potent combination of shame and fear. Though I understood intellectually that our arrangement was fair, I still felt like a failure. I was terrified by the idea of dependency, which seemed like an ominous gateway.

I’d been employed ever since my parents, both from working class backgrounds, had secured me my first work permit at 14. I came to understand financial independence as freedom. When I’d moved out of my childhood home as a teenager, I refused much help from my parents because I knew it gave them a stake in how I lived. The years I spent in my early 20s as a sex worker had 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 addicted bottom, I’d been obsessively self-sufficient. No matter how messy my life got, I always made rent. But at 26, an unpublished writer and student, I was deeply in debt for the first time. I’d later come to understand this as the ordinary predicament of most budding artists who don’t come from money.

In our second year of living together, my boyfriend offered to pay off my credit card debt. My payments were barely touching the principal, he pointed out. I nodded, but felt the blood rush out of my face.

“That’s really generous,” I said. “But that idea makes me feel … uncomfortable.” This was an understatement. I felt like vomiting.

“You can think of it as loan, if you want,” he said.

Over the years we lived together, I started cooking more. I liked to cook, and as a child with both Puerto Rican and Italian grandmothers, I had been raised to enjoy feeding people. I don’t know when I started doing his laundry, but it soon became routine as well.

“It’s a little weird that you’re doing all of this,” he said to me once. I brushed it off. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m home more often than you.” And in some ways, it was fine. Folding laundry was easier than writing.

It wasn’t only in our home that things got weird. I covered my tattoos in front of his parents. I certainly didn’t tell them I was writing a book about my years as an addict and sex worker; in fact, I told almost no one. I amassed a rich collection of cardigans. My life started to feel like a kind of cosplay. I’d never looked so conventional. And I had never asked for or accepted financial help.

In our third year together, he and I started talking about having a baby and getting married. While these prospects excited me on some level, they also filled me with trepidation. How had I 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 the costume cease to be play and become my real life?

What happened was exactly the thing I should have expected: I fell in love with a woman and left him. The breakup was agony, made worse by the fact of his generosity and my inability to repay him. Out of guilt, I went to weeks of post-breakup couples’ therapy with him and abandoned most of our shared belongings. After a few months, however, I threw away those cardigans and got some new tattoos. Then, I published that book about everything I’d learned to hide.

When I reflected on our relationship, I recoiled from my dismay and bafflement, and turned toward self-disgust, which felt safer. What on earth had possessed me? The patriarchy, I decided: I had stepped into that old hoary theater of heterosexuality and found myself typecast, complete with laundry and dishes and cardigans.

The story might have ended there. I stayed with that woman — whom I still refer to as “my best ex” — for three years. Then, I found myself in love with a different woman. Though I was less broke at this point, she was in a similarly distant tax bracket. She was prone to grand gestures and expensive gift-giving: She bought me plane tickets, massages, expensive meals, jewelry and Gucci sunglasses. I was stunned by this showering, and even more so by my acceptance of it.

“I want to take care of you,” she often said. Every time she uttered those words, I felt a flash of fear. Look what had happened the last time I let someone take care of me! But behind that fear was something else. A swooning feeling. A ravenous hunger. To my own surprise, I found that I desperately wanted to be taken care of.

For a time, the narcotic effect of her grand gestures of care obscured the reality of our dynamic: It was the most unstable I’d ever known. We fought constantly. I obsessed over our relationship to the exclusion of almost everything else in my life.

And yet I once again strove to become the good wife — completing mundane administrative tasks on her behalf, carrying her coat at public events and making myself small to avoid conflict.

When I left her, my life was in ruins. I had become estranged from friends and family. And I had again become a stranger to myself. But my eyes were also opened: I saw that the common denominator between those two relationships had not been gender or sexual orientation, nor even financial difference. It had been me.

The very quality that had made me so proud — my need for control over my own independence, my inability to gracefully accept help — had generated an imbalance in me. I could not accept the healthy support of one lover and ran headlong into a warped dynamic with another.

In the aftermath, I came to see the relationship with my TV editor boyfriend with more nuance. I had spent the years leading up to our relationship as a kind of career criminal, braced for judgment, violence, arrest and humiliation. I’d always held down a job, sure, but my life had been precarious and vulnerable in all the ways being an addict and sex worker make a life and a woman. I would have been embarrassed to admit it at the time, but there was relief in the sheer vanilla quality of my life with him. I didn’t blame myself for craving that comfort, only for refusing to recognize it.

In some moments, it had also been tempting to reduce the story of that tumultuous relationship with the woman who wanted to take care of me to an easily digested narrative: She had been a controlling mastermind. Or perhaps we had both been temporarily possessed by a toxic chemistry. Whatever partial truths existed in those explanations, I knew it had been that same ravenous hunger for care — produced by my staunch, lifelong refusal of it — that had driven me back to her again and again. That there was only one person who could render me capable of a more balanced manner of loving: me.

As I’ve aged, the comfort of blaming someone or something else for my hardships has become rare. I try to hold myself accountable with more tenderness than recrimination. When I become a stranger to myself, the explanation is always complicated.

The intervening years have taught me better how to give and receive all kinds of resources, including money. My wife and I are pretty good at not playing out our issues in that particular area. Neither of us craves the kind of care one should only expect from a parent or a god, and we both know how to ask for help when we need it. We are just two adults, each taking responsibility for ourselves, and choosing every day to live alongside each other. It can be a lot more work, but costs us less in the end.

Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including “Girlhood,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and a professor at the University of Iowa.

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