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. Heres this weeks question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:Im 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 isnt necessarily harder-working or more successful (would you believe that having a PhD in a technical field can justlead 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 theyre 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?Dear Fair Fianc,Theres 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 wont feel like youre 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; its just that hes contributing more financially, and youre 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 Id be cheating you out of a deeper opportunity. Because this struggle isnt just offering you the chance to think about stuff like joint bank accounts and rental payments. Its 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 youre 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, becauseI 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 theyre illusions that we use to shield ourselves from our own vulnerability. No one is truly independentMany philosophers have long recognized that, however independent we like to think we are, were actually inherently interdependent. This was one of the Buddhas 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 youre a static substance separate from others, thats just a convenient shorthand a fiction. Have a question for this advice column?Fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com.In reality, the Buddha said, you dont have a fixed self. Your self is always changing in response to different conditions in your environment. In fact, its 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 youre nothing but a bundle of different perceptions in perpetual flux, theres no you that exists independently of your boyfriend and all the other people youre in contact with: They are literally making you in every moment by furnishing your perceptions, experiences, moods. That means the idea of a you thats 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 youre also made by your ancestors, teachers, and cultural heritage).At first glance, this might seem hard to reconcile with feminism. Arent 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 youll see that thats a serious misinterpretation. From Simone de Beauvoir onward, feminists havent been trying to eliminate interdependence altogether theyve 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. Thats 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 out, we all depend on others at different points in our lives as kids, when were 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 dont live in that world. American society is especially hyper-individualistic. It recognizes interdependence neither on the metaphysical level ( la Buddha and Hume) nor on the social policy level ( la Gilligan and Noddings). No wonder many women are still wary of financial dependence!Even though you live in that wider context, Id 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, youre not actually financially dependent on your boyfriend, even if hes covering more than half the rent. In that case, the real fear here is not about finances at all. Its 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 thats not easy. It feels painfully vulnerable. Yet if you trust that your boyfriend genuinely sees you as equals if hes demonstrated that through both his words and actions then at some point youve got to trust that he wont weaponize your vulnerability against you. If you dont, 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, wholl be making you poorer. Bonus: What Im readingRelated 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 Couldnt by Beth Singler, an expert on the intersection of AI and religion. I dont 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 philosophers 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 explains, supposedly allow you to feel youre communicating with dead loved ones. In my experience, losing someone shatters your assumptive worldview your core beliefs about yourself and about life and thats 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 Id 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.Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More: