“it's kind of a turn-off to be 'better' than my partner”

mixed feelings’ multi-voiced advice column features a mental health expert or writer who responds to your most pressing existential conundrums. Use our anonymous form to be considered for a future newsletter. This week,

Bel Hawkins

answers: Should I leave my unambitious partner?

art by Logan Tsugita.

dear mf,

I'm a 26-year-old female with a bachelor's degree and a full-time "big girl" job with a nearly 6-figure salary. I have a lot of friends and hobbies, strong relationships with family, and pets, and am fairly active in my community.

My boyfriend, while being incredibly kind and smart and witty…works a very low-paying dead end job, and really has no ambition to do...anything! He does have friends but never sees them, he doesn't really make enough money to be able to go out and do things, and he mostly just spends time lying around.

We've been together for three years, and he still hasn't really done anything to seek treatment for his mental health struggles. He's very intelligent when it comes to certain things, but when it comes to "life admin" stuff, he’s completely incompetent. He always supports me and goes along with what I want to do, but I'm getting tired of having to run his life for him too.

I love traveling, I love seeing friends and trying new restaurants, I'm thinking of going to grad school, and he’s supportive but not really an active participant in that. I feel stuck. I love him…but I am tired of dragging him to do anything (sometimes literally)…

For what it's worth, I'm not really interested in the traditional path of getting married/having kids, so that timeline isn't a concern, but I would still like to live my life!…When I've tried to date more ambitious guys, their personalities turn me off. At the same time, it's kind of a turn-off to be "better" than my partner. I want us to be on an equal playing field. Do I keep towing him along behind me, or do I leave him in the dust? — Ambitious Angel, she/her

Bel Hawkins

is a freelance writer and creative based in Lisbon. Her book, Make It Make Sense, co-authored with Lucy Blakiston from Shit You Should Care About, is out in the US this February. Follow her on Substack and Instagram.

dear Ambitious Angel,

Your question landed in my inbox at the same time I was making a decision about a new relationship, deciding whether the pangs of uncertainty I was experiencing were just symptoms of being alive or something more confronting: signs that a future with this person in the way I wished it could be untenable. It was as though I was carrying around your conundrum with me while I untangled my own, hoping what I learned from it could then be passed on to you as some sort of healing chain of events.

How do we balance ambition and clarity with the messy ambivalence of love? How do I offer you something deeper than a TED talk on self-worth and trusting your instincts? I know love to be more complicated than this (Googles ‘Final scene in Normal People’ just to remind herself). I know your relationship will be more nuanced than what you could fit into the question box. And I know your love is real because there’s a reason you’re there in the first place. There's incredible value, and pride to feel, in knowing who you are and what you want. But applying that confidence relationally is so much easier said than done.

Before we get into it, I must acknowledge how much work you’ve already done. You have an epic job. You know you don’t want to subscribe to the pressures of a “traditional” life. You know where you want to travel and what you want that to feel like. People spend their whole lives chasing this kind of clarity. I once sat outside the house of a Californian psychic, begging her for answers to similar existentialisms, only to leave more confused and with $50 less in my Venmo account. The fact that you already have such a clear sense of self is a wonderful feat. Don’t underestimate it. But also know you’re wrestling with a very human feeling.

relational ambivalence will ruin our lives if we let it

How often do we torture ourselves with the angst of holding two contradictory thoughts about someone and wondering which to believe? Loving them like they’re a finite resource one moment and hating the way they brush their teeth the next. Agonising over whether they’re the right person you should work through this with or if, actually, your perfect match is right now browsing gluten-free pancake mix at a nearby bodega. Relational ambivalence is exhausting because it forces us to live in contradictions, unsure of which side to trust.

Psychologist Esther Perel knows all about this. In her blog, she talks about the chokehold relational ambivalence has on modern relationships because of the “human supermarket” dilemma: modern love and our online lives trap us between endless options and the pressure for certainty. Call me old-fashioned, but in times of great confusion, I love a list. Column a: What value does this person still bring to your life? Column b: What things are you still mourning that you know you won’t be able to receive in your current relationship? You’ll start to see whether it's feasible for the scales to ever be balanced. As Perel puts it, “Love is not an obligation. It’s a gift.” You’re giving yours, but are you receiving enough in return? Is it feasible for this to change in the time you’re willing to give it to?

And then, this thing happens when one part of your life levels up — everything else comes under the microscope. I remember three months into my first “big girl” job, I came home to meet my boyfriend, only to wait two hours for him to arrive, stoned, pushing his falling-apart moped up the driveway. I thought: how can I be this put-together by day, and in my personal life rely on someone so... unreliable? It was an aching moment of clarity so vivid I broke up with him on my lunch break the next day, which is not something I’d recommend (re-entering the office with a sudden intense case of ‘hayfever’ and putting on Dido for everyone to listen to on repeat for the rest of the day), but to feel overcome with certainty like that is a feeling I think you’re looking for.

Time columnist and feminist dating coach Myisha Battle understands how complex navigating your changing sense of worth in a relationship can be. “It’s always a good idea to have patience with your partner if you see them struggling in areas where you have more easily found success. The issue comes in when you feel that you may be fundamentally more motivated and driven than they are,” she says. The question then becomes: Can they grow with me, or am I paying a price I can’t afford?

love is a verb

There’s that scene in Frances Ha where Greta Gerwig’s character sits at a dinner party explaining her vision of love. “It’s that thing,” she says, “when you’re with someone, and you love them, and they know it, and they love you, and you know it, but it’s a party, and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining, and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes… because that is your person in this life.”

It’s gorgeous — but although I crave that feeling, too — I know it’s naively skimming over the real-ness of life. Journalist Natasha Lunn, author of Conversations on Love, puts it best when she writes, “Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It's a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression. It's the ability to take responsibility of one's own behavior. Responsibility is freedom.” Taking responsibility for our decisions for what we want and how we want to feel is intimidating (because if anything goes wrong it’s our fault), but ultimately the thing that frees us.

giving change a chance

One of the most freeing realizations I’ve had amidst the unruly waves of modern love is that people can tell you what to do, and you can know it’s right and still yearn for the opposite. I’ve spent so many hours (and voice notes and internet therapy carousels) searching for clarity about a relationship, paralyzed by this fear that if I ended it, I was giving up my one great opportunity for love. I want someone to say, ‘Fuck that guy, no Bel! End it, and this perfect person will come your way!’ but sadly, no one can make those types of promises. We have to trust that we, ourselves, are enough.

But if there’s a part of you that truly, deeply believes in this man’s capacity to listen to how you’re feeling, give him an opportunity to change. Go somewhere neutral, and set the tone that you want to have a vulnerable conversation with one another in the hope of a happier future. Give him a chance to talk about what might not be working for him and open up about what’s making you feel unsure. Use language carefully, conscious that admitting something’s not working can be a hot sword to the ego. From there, it’s all data capture. How do they react? Are they open to changing? What timeframe feels fair to expect them to follow through? Did this bring you closer together or leave you internally screaming? If you met your close friends in a dimply-lit bar afterwards, what truths would they tell you?

In many ways than we give it credit for, work is a lot like love. Opening your relationship up for a performance review is not dissimilar to asking your manager for a one-on-one and having a conversation about what’s not working at your job instead of quitting before they’ve had the chance to do anything about it. But like any negotiation, if what’s in it for us is not enough, we have to be prepared to walk away.

experimenting with solitude

Whenever I’m trying to find the answer to something, I always find it comes to me when I’m alone. You’ve mentioned places you want to travel but struggle to get your boyfriend on board—so why not go solo? Give yourself a chance to recalibrate and notice what parts of your life feel expansive and what no longer fits. You return home a slightly altered version of who you are, and it becomes obvious what no longer fits.

Battle’s also an advocate for taking time to figure out how you really feel. She says, “Most people stay in relationships that they are ambivalent about because they either lack experience and are unsure about what their other options are, or they just don’t have enough information yet to make a solid decision. It can take time to sort through all of the feelings that surface when you start to question your relationship,” Give yourself the gift of that time and space. But don’t draw it out forever.

figuring out what you want love to feel like

You mention you’re not horny for the ambitious men you’ve tried dating, which, on the one hand, I completely understand because I once went on a date with a man who spent the entire evening taking calls about the fluctuating rate of his augmented reality stock and I sat there all night mentally seething.

But looking at dating as a binary like this is limiting, to say the least. Romance is not either someone struggling to get excited about life with you OR some crypto bro sloshing back isotonics and not asking questions. Romance is the full spectrum of human life (bleak, boring, exhilarating, shocking, hot, exciting), the same way traveling to other countries is — but only if you approach it open to possibility. A life’s work, but it’s a mentality that will truly change how you view what’s romantically possible for you.

Back to that film scene from earlier — part of our life’s quest is to figure out why we’re drawn to the people we are and what that says about us. When relationships aren’t working, they reveal gaps within ourselves that need attention. Not to self-reference here, but Lucy and I thought about this a lot when writing our book, Make It Make Sense, and I really love this line we landed on: “Good love is a relief. It feels like peace.”

Imagine you’re the girl looking across the room at the party. Is the person you see your current partner? Or is it a version of yourself that feels most alive? Sometimes, love is choosing someone amazing. And, in all my days and emails and heartbreaks and romantic sabbaticals, I’ve come to find that sometimes, love is choosing yourself.