I Keep Undervaluing Myself and Blaming the Buyers

I taught them my clearance price long before any of them learned my middle name.

I was twenty-six when the math started bugging me. A guy I'd been seeing, let's call him M. because he was mercantile, market-rate, he looked at a woman the way an accountant looks at a spreadsheet. He'd quietly stopped reaching for his wallet. Not all at once. No dramatic scene I could point at and say no. He just let the gesture die. Let me flag down the waiter. Let me split the bill for a month or two, then stopped splitting it at all. I only noticed because I'd memorized the exact amount we used to argue over, down to the tax. He started saying you always know what I like when I ordered. I mistook that for tenderness. It wasn't intimacy. It was delegation. He'd outsourced the labor and the check, so gently that by the time I felt the weight of it, the job had been mine for months. Maybe longer. I can't remember the exact week it shifted, just that the pile of receipts on my desk got taller, and I kept folding them into my purse like they were nothing.

I knew. I wasn't confused. I wasn't blind. I saw the check landing in my hand every single time, and I still took it. Taking the check felt like the only thing I had to trade. Where did I learn that? My mother. Every rom-com I ever cried at. The girls in the bar bathroom at 1 a.m. ranking ourselves like inventory. We'd sit there and quote our own availability back to each other like we were reading stock prices. And somewhere in all that noise I learned the equation. Loveable equaled useful. Irreplaceable just meant convenient. Cherished was easy, or so I told myself. Bad math, but it was the only math I had.

So I made myself easy to carry. Answered texts before he hit send. Knew his coworker's first name, the brand of whiskey his dead father supposedly drank, his mother had some surgery coming up, or maybe it already happened. I can't remember the details anymore, just that I carried them. I learned the specific groan the radiator made in January in his apartment, and I'd time my showers so the pipes wouldn't scream. I asked about the novel he hadn't written, the one he talked about with that specific evangelical glee men reserve for CrossFit or their new diets, asked him sincerely, again and again, even though the page count never moved. My therapist calls it over-functioning, which is a very clinical term for the act of paying for a relationship and then acting shocked when you look at the receipt. I go to therapy every few months, when I remember to book it, with the vague, floating commitment of someone doing a juice cleanse they don't really believe in. And I was doing all this, carrying all this, paying for all this, and then I'd get genuinely — or maybe performatively, honestly who can tell the difference anymore — mystified when he stopped noticing the cost.

I wiped out my own price tag. By the time he left, for some woman who texted me a single question mark a year later, just ?, like she was filling out a form I'd already half-completed for her, I didn't know what I was worth outside the list of things I'd done for free. He'd loved me the way you love a gym membership you forgot to cancel. Grieved the loss of a function. It was brief.

Years later. Different guy. Call him J. for the city he was in, or the jacket, or the smile across a crowded bar, a smile that made me feel like I'd already signed a contract I hadn't read. This one seemed to like me for reasons unrelated to how useful I was. He liked my voice. The way I read out loud from whatever book was on my nightstand. My loud, stupid opinions about Rothko, whatever that even means, I just know the colors make me feel something. He liked me the way a man likes a woman to show off at dinner parties, the kind he introduces to his mom with that tilt of the head. The kind everyone just assumes has a trust fund.

I had none of that. Forty grand in the hole from a grad program I'd quit. Two jobs I didn't put on my dating profile. Rent paid by a transfer from my mom I told my friends was just a weird tax thing I did for her.

But I'd figured out the next move by then. The quiet kind of show. The corrosive kind. The performance of acting like you have more than you do. Pretending to be unimpressed by a menu. The performance of understanding that in his world, in that specific kind of expensive man's world, you absolutely, under no circumstances, ever, ever show that you need anything. Even a refill.

I wore the same coat for three winters straight, just rotating the scarves to hide the wear. I lied casually about where I lived. I refused to let him pay, but I couldn't afford to pay, so I'd split the difference on three credit cards, handing him my card with a straight face while saying I preferred to split things down the middle. I was running my whole life like a tryout, his attention the only score that counted, and I was the underdog who had to wear the right shoes just to step on the track.

I confused looking expensive with mattering, spending money I didn't have like it was proof I deserved to be loved. When the whole thing collapsed, they always collapse, the ones built on the illusion of equal footing, he didn't even know what he was mourning. He thought he'd loved a real woman. He'd actually loved a costume I'd sewed myself. Eleven grand in extra debt to keep wearing it. That's the whole point of the costume: the man never sees the bill. He only sees the version of you that doesn't stand in the blinding aisle of a Target at 11 p.m. with the calculator app open, listening to the scanner beep, staring at the flickering light above aisle seven.

There's one more habit I really hate admitting. The breakup one. The one I've pulled in every single relationship, including the marriage, briefly, badly, in a courthouse in a city neither of us lived in, with two random people we'd met at a bar the night before as witnesses. Two witnesses for the collapse of something we hadn't even bothered to build.

I said it too much. I didn't say it like a promise. I said it like a period at the end of a sentence. The way you say I'm tired or pass the salt. I said it angry. I said it scared, or both at once. Once, the worst time, I said it because I was bored, which is a specific kind of slow violence you commit in a bathrobe while holding a coffee mug. I said it on a Tuesday in a parking garage while he was digging in his pockets for a quarter for the meter. I remember the dull clink of the coin against the meter box, the smell of old, wet concrete, how completely unrelated all of that was to what I was actually saying. I said it in a hotel room in another city on a Friday. I said it in the middle of a sentence about the recycling bin, and I meant it about the entire marriage.

What I figured out eventually, the hard way, because I don't think there's any other way to learn it, is that the word leave is a muscle you can wear out. Say it enough times in front of the same person without ever actually leaving, and they stop flinching. They learn it means nothing. You hand them the cost of an empty chair, a missing toothbrush. You teach them you cost nothing.

I don't think it's their fault. I need to write that down. M. wasn't a villain for letting me pay. J. wasn't stupid for not noticing the debt, or for liking the version of me that kept a calculator app closed. The guy I married wasn't wrong for taking me at my word when I kept saying I was leaving, again and again, until the day I actually did it, and the guy who just looked kind of tired and unsurprised when I finally left. They just paid the price I taught them to pay. I was the one at the register. I was the one ringing up my own discounts, smiling like an idiot, all the way down to the bottom of the barrel.

I have the words for it now. The pop-psych terms, the acronyms, the worksheets, the books with the soft covers that stain if you touch them with wet hands. I can spot the exact second in a fight when my nervous system decides the safest thing to do is vanish. I know why I do it. Knowing why hasn't stopped me. At best, it's let me do it with straighter shoulders.

Lately, I've been watching a different type of woman. The one who isn't over-giving, drowning in fake debt, constantly threatening to leave. The one who healed the wound, read the right book on the right Tuesday, and now just sits there, calm, in the center of her own unbothered, expensive truth.

I don't trust her. I think she's doing the exact same trick I was doing, just wearing a different outfit. The only difference between the woman who gives too much and the one who stops giving is the costume she wears. I think she's a creditor, and her refusal to be a debtor is basically the same math I've been doing for years, just on the other side of the page. Expensive and loved aren't even in the same column.

I don't know what a woman looks like who has just stopped keeping score entirely. I've never seen one outside of a thirty-second ad for self-care. Maybe those are literally my only choices in a relationship: over-give, over-perform, over-leave. Maybe being a woman in love just means rotating through these three ways of failing forever, dressing them up in different outfits and pretending they're different things.

I don't know why I'm typing this. Probably just so the next time I do one of these things, and I will do it, soon, to some poor guy who hasn't even met me yet, I have a piece of paper proving that I once knew better. Not that knowing better saved me. It didn't. I'm starting to suspect the point isn't figuring it out. The point is just admitting it out loud, to whoever is still awake, that the register is still open, the discounts are still running, and I'm still standing here holding the scanner. Even though it's late. Even though my feet hurt. Even though the line behind me is empty.