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.