Updates: “Moved to Write” Responds

Since I wrote I’ve taken a (terrible!) temp job to save up money for around three months of living expenses after I make my move. I’m almost there, and I plan to quit my job, quit temping (yay!), and make my move next month. I’ve also got a number of extremely promising job prospects in place. My boyfriend has a friend whose wife is in my field and who has an enormous contact list and a similarly sized heart. She and I have gotten to be pretty close friends over the past few months, so I’m excited about that and grateful for the help she’s been giving me.

My move -will- be boyfriend financed, and I’ll be moving in with him. Just in case the moving in doesn’t work out, the bf and I worked out a deal. Once I find a job, I’ll set up a savings account into which I’ll monthly deposit “rent.” At the end of three months, I can take the money and use it move into a place of my own or take him on an awesome vacation for our two-year anniversary.

I really appreciated Wendy’s (and other’s) reminder that this move would be mutually beneficial and that it would probably be a good investment for us both.

One thing that underpinned a lot of my anxiety–and that I didn’t discuss much in my initial letter–was a concern that I was kind of a, um, chippy. My boyfriend is a bit older and is better educated, more successful, and a lot wealthier than I am. I’m more conventionally attractive than he is. Taking his money for anything seemed like a confirmation that this was not a relationship between equals.

Being pretty broke and underemployed for the past couple of years has been hard on me. I’m by nature hard-driving and competitive. I sometimes feel like I’m a failure in my professional life and, by extension, at life in general, so it’s easy for me to think that someone’s dating me mostly because of shallow things. I finally brought up the whole “taking your money makes me feel bad because I feel like you’re dating me because I’m cute and that makes me feel like a whore” thing a couple of months ago. My boyfriend quite literally spit out his coffee at that news, cartoon-style. He hadn’t thought of my job situation or my half a graduate degree as proof of anything but a down economy, and he considers several of the volunteer things that I do to be really impressive accomplishments, which I kind of guess they are.