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?

Dear Fair Fiancé,

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........

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