Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
I’m getting married and struggling with what is “fair” when it comes to combining incomes and sharing expenses. My boyfriend makes twice as much as I do, but isn’t necessarily harder-working or more successful (would you believe that having a PhD in a technical field can just…lead to more money?). Accordingly, he wants to pay for more of our shared expenses, like rent. I understand why this would be considered “fair” but am really resisting it.
When others pay, it feels like they’re trying to control me or encroach on my independence. Yet I do think that there is something obstinate and rigidly, falsely “feminist” in the way I insist on 50/50 in our relationship. What should I do?
There’s a very normie way to answer this question: I could advise you to make a list of all the ways your boyfriend is actually dependent on you — emotional labor, household chores, whatever the case may be — so you won’t feel like you’re disproportionately falling into a dependent role if he pays for more than half of your shared expenses. In other words, I could try to convince you that your relationship is still 50/50; it’s just that he’s contributing more financially, and you’re contributing more in other ways.
Which, to be clear, could be true! And it could be a very valuable thing to reflect on. But if I left it at that, I think I’d be cheating you out of a deeper opportunity. Because this struggle isn’t just offering you the chance to think about stuff like joint bank accounts and rental payments. It’s offering you a chance at spiritual growth.
I say that because your struggle is about love. Real love is an omnivore: It will eat its way through all your pretty illusions. It will, if you’re lucky, pulverize your preconceived notions. As the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector once wrote in a wonderfully weird short story:
Few people desire true love because love shakes our confidence in everything else. And few can bear to lose all their other illusions. There are some who opt for love in the belief that love will enrich their personal lives. On the contrary: love is poverty, in the end. Love is to possess nothing. Love is also the deception of what one believed to be love.
What are the illusions that love destroys? Chief among them are things you mentioned: independence, control. Believe me, it brings me no joy to say this, because…I love feeling independent! I love feeling like I have control! And I, too, really struggle if I feel like anyone is encroaching on those things. But, alas, I do think they’re illusions that we use to shield ourselves from our own vulnerability.
No one is truly independent
Many philosophers have long recognized that, however independent we like to think we are, we’re actually inherently interdependent.
This was one of the Buddha’s key ideas. When he lived around 500 BCE in India, it was common to believe that each person has a permanent self or soul — a fixed essence that makes you an individual, persisting entity. The Buddha rejected that premise. He argued that even though you use words like “me” and “I,” which suggest that you’re a static substance separate from others, that’s just a convenient shorthand — a fiction.
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In reality, the Buddha said, you don’t have a fixed self. Your self is always changing in response to different conditions in your environment. In fact, it’s nothing but the sum total of those conditions — your perceptions, experiences, moods, and so on — just like a chariot is nothing but its wheels, axles, and other component parts.
In Western philosophy, it took a while for this idea to gain prominence, largely because the idea of the Christian soul was so entrenched. But in the 18th century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume — who was influenced not only by British empiricists but also potentially by Buddhism — wrote:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.
He added that a person is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
Why does this matter? Because if you’re nothing but a bundle of different perceptions in perpetual flux, there’s no “you” that exists independently of your boyfriend and all the other people you’re in contact with: They are literally making “you” in every moment by furnishing your perceptions, experiences, moods. That means the idea of a you that’s separate from others is, at the deepest level, just an illusion. You are interdependent with them for your very you-ness.
The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who died just a few years ago, had a lovely term for this: interbeing. He would say that you inter-are with your boyfriend: You are made, in part, by all the ways that his actions and words have affected you (just like you’re also made by your ancestors, teachers, and cultural heritage).
At first glance, this might seem hard to reconcile with feminism. Aren’t we supposed to be strong, independent women? How can we do that without the “independent” bit?
But take a closer look at feminist thought, and you’ll see that that’s a serious misinterpretation.
From Simone de Beauvoir onward, feminists haven’t been trying to eliminate interdependence altogether — they’ve been fighting against structurally unequal interdependence, where women have no choice but to rely on men financially because their work outside the home is underpaid relative to men, and their work inside the home gets no pay at all. That’s a nonconsensual, unequal form of interdependence, and the goal was a world where partners can meet as equals. The goal was never a world where we all live as islands.
In fact, many feminist philosophers argue that being fully “independent” is neither desirable nor possible. As thinkers like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings have pointed outwe all depend on others at different points in our lives — as kids, when we’re sick, as we get older. They champion a world that acknowledges the reality of interdependence. That would include government policies like appropriate pay for child care and elder care, as well as greater social recognition for the value of emotional labor and household chores, like I mentioned above.
But we still don’t live in that world. American society is especially hyper-individualistic. It recognizes interdependence neither on the metaphysical level (à la Buddha and Hume) nor on the social policy level (à la Gilligan and Noddings). No wonder many women are still wary of financial dependence!
Even though you live in that wider context, I’d encourage you to take a close look at the specifics of your personal situation and consider a crucial distinction: real financial dependence versus felt financial dependence. If you have your own job or could readily return to the workforce, you’re not actually financially dependent on your boyfriend, even if he’s covering more than half the rent. In that case, the real fear here is not about finances at all. It’s about facing up to the terrifying, beautiful, messy fact — a fact that love is now revealing to you — that you are and have always been interdependent.
Believe me, I know that’s not easy. It feels painfully vulnerable. Yet if you trust that your boyfriend genuinely sees you as equals — if he’s demonstrated that through both his words and actions — then at some point you’ve got to trust that he won’t weaponize your vulnerability against you. If you don’t, you will be cheating yourself out of the benefits that come with accepting interdependence. And in an important sense it will be you, not your boyfriend, who’ll be making you poorer.
Bonus: What I’m reading
Related to the idea that the self is a fiction, this week, I read a near-apocalyptic short story titled “And All the Automata of London Couldn’t” by Beth Singler, an expert on the intersection of AI and religion. I don’t want to give too much of a spoiler, but suffice it to say it contains these sentences: “Descartes’ little automata daughter, the clockwork doll that scared a bunch of sailors so much that they threw her overboard in their terror and superstition. A lovely bit of gossip to puncture the great philosopher’s pride! How dare he describe man as a machine!” The starkest manifestation of human vulnerability is our mortality, and I wish people would do the hard work of facing up to loss instead of turning to AI-powered deadbots — new tools that, as the New York Times explainssupposedly allow you to feel you’re communicating with dead loved ones. In my experience, losing someone shatters your assumptive worldview — your core beliefs about yourself and about life — and that’s extremely painful but also extremely generative: It forces you to make yourself anew.This Guardian article about a woman who quit her job, closed her bank account, and lives without money is quite something. I think I’d be too terrified to live her lifestyle (and I also think her lifestyle is built on a bedrock of privilege), but this bit stuck out: “I actually feel more secure than I did when I was earning money,” she said, “because all through human history, true security has always come from living in community.”
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