You're Not a Power Couple If He's the Only One With Power.

He seemed so sure of himself, of who he was in the world. As he drove me home in his Ford Mustang, my date started sharing little anecdotes about his life. When he mentioned being close to his mother, I responded, “That makes sense.”

He asked, “What's that supposed to mean?”

I responded, “You just seem comfortable with yourself.”

It was true, not just his ease with himself, but also with who he was in the world. Something of an epiphany dawned on me that night: I was jealous of him. Not just his car, his job or his financial freedom, but his steadiness. The way people respected him in the world.

As I mentioned to him on one of our later dates, “Nobody's falling over themselves trying to impress me.” It wasn't just envy around his career, but also the way we, as a society, fall over ourselves when we encounter a tall, handsome and successful white man. It wasn't the same for women in his position, because they weren't deemed “complete” by society until they had husbands or were on the path to finding a spouse.

He didn't feel the same vulnerability I felt, and it wasn't just about his career. We talk a lot about division among women, and jealousy and competition within our gender. This kind of division is alive and well, and I've had my fair share of dealing with jealous women and feeling that way at times myself.

However, we rarely discuss women's gender envy towards men.

When it comes to girl-on-girl crime, we take action. However, when it starts becoming about envy towards men, we wouldn't dare. There's a feeling of wanting to be around that man's success rather than wishing to destroy it. When it comes to women, we're all too comfortable criticising one another.

The number of times I've heard a girlfriend with a bad boyfriend talk poorly about all the women in her life while putting her mediocre spouse on a pedestal...

As Lena Dunham said in her memoir, there's something about being with a successful, attractive man that makes you deemed “okay” by society.

As I sat in this man's Ford Mustang, I realised what I had been doing. I'd been dating the kind of men I wanted to be. But like Cher, I wanted to be my own rich man.

If you're my friend, you know that I don't go out with broke men. This was, and still is in some ways, something I own with pride. I have friends who baby their boyfriends who are unemployed or underemployed and want to fix them, and that could never be me.

But it turned out that I was going out with these successful men because I wanted to fix myself.

I somehow thought their success would rub off on me like some kind of magic.

Now, do I think going out with men who don't have jobs is the answer? Absolutely not. But this epiphany is not about my preference for ambitious men, but rather about what I thought they could do for me. I believed that through proximity, I could somehow be fulfilled. But no amount of male validation could fill the hole left by not chasing your dreams or fulfilling your destiny.

Many well-meaning people around me seem to believe that a lot of self-love can be born from having a loving boyfriend. While I think a healthy relationship can contribute significantly to how you feel about yourself, if it's the source, that's a problem. When I was twenty-four and living in New York City for the summer, I would put up little affirmation Post-its on my mirror.

My roommate at the time peeked into my room and told me, unprompted, “Now that I have a boyfriend, I just don't think I need to do stuff like that.”

At the time, I wasn't really rocked by what she had said. It was the height of BRAT summer, and I was often only briefly interacting with her on my way out to the next event.

It seemed like fun was always around the corner for me, and she had told me that she preferred a night that ended at 10 pm. She also expressed a preference for hanging out with other girls who had boyfriends because, to quote her, those kinds of girls often preferred a night that ended at 10 pm.

Looking back at that remark, I hope she's okay now. Bless her heart.

We have a saying that “the fish rots from the head” when it comes to a bad work environment or friend group. But this proverb can also apply to your own self-talk. If a fruit is rotten, it doesn't just mean nobody wants it, but also that it's not healthy to eat.

Slowly but surely, these days I'm finding ways to romanticise my alone time. Wearing cute nightgowns, doing my nails, going to yoga, writing, and the list goes on. The truth is, if you get a boyfriend and stop making whatever your version of sticky notes is, you'll fall out of love with your life.

Even though the tragedy is often painted as a single woman with cats, the real catastrophe would be having children and a husband with no space for yourself. As Harry Styles says, fill your cup first and let them fall in love with the overflow.

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 Photo © Victoria Villarroel & Carter Gregory Photographed by Tyrell Hampton (@tyrellhampton)