Was My Boyfriend Financially Controlling? Was My Girlfriend?
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.
