How I Fell for an ‘I’m the Man’ Man

My new guy and I were lying next to each other, half-covered by bedsheets, the afternoon sun warming my feet. We had been dating for about a month.

“I’m the man,” he said. “I should be in charge of the money.”

“Right,” I said, feeling a jolt of anxiety. As a partner at a financial consulting firm, I thought: “I’m in charge of the money every day.”

But I reasoned that he and I weren’t going to be sharing a checking account anytime soon, so why end things prematurely? Besides, in the context of our conversation, he wasn’t even referring to me but to his ex-wife; they had been driven apart by financial disagreements. This put some distance between his words and me, or so I told myself.

I didn’t normally go for guys who said things like, “I’m the man.” I usually fell for men who didn’t argue when I said it was my turn to pay for dinner. These men noticed my intelligence before my looks, or at least they said they did.

But in my post-divorce haze, I found myself falling for a different kind of man.

As his words lingered, I felt a combination of shock and curiosity, as if encountering a species previously thought extinct. I knew there were men who believed they should be in charge of money. The shock came from encountering one who readily admitted it.

But he already had made clear he believed in traditional gender roles. With sex, too, he had said, “I’m the man. I want to lead.”