Since I didn't foresee a long-term relationship, I wasted no effort analyzing his every move or bothering to impress him. He even helped me pack, which it turns out is a very efficient way for someone to learn everything about you. I wore whatever random clothes were still in my drawers, I didn't bother with my hair, I forgot to put on makeup. If it weren't for the hooking up, he could have been a roommate.

But then one day when we were sitting on the lone sofa in my living room eating chicken salad sandwiches over newspapers because I had already packed the plates, I was taking in his grey eyes, his voice, the eyelashes that fluttered behind his glasses, and there was something strangely familiar about it all. Like we were already fifty years in. Cupid's arrow had hit me so suddenly I'm surprised I didn't feel for the blood. I was sitting there in a cotton bathrobe covered in dust and my hair in something barely resembling a bun and I was mortified. I wouldn't want my mom seeing me like this and yet this is what Chris thought I looked like.

By the next day I was singularly focused on damage control. I got myself to the gym. I got a bikini wax and a pedicure. I took a long shower, shaved, washed my hair. I spent an hour blow drying it, section by section, and using a straightening iron, also section by section. I applied eye makeup with surgical precision. I dug my lingerie and most flattering jeans out from the bottom of an enormous cardboard box. By the time I left my apartment I looked like a human being. A female, potentially attractive one.

Chris was as happy to see me that night as any other time we had hung out. But not more.
"Hi," he said. I waited for him to say something else, like, "Wow!" or "You clean up nice." Something. But he just kissed me, as always, and we were on our way.

At the end of the night he didn't notice the lingerie. "Look." I said, showing off my body like a GE Microwave-Oven Combo on The Price Is Right. "I'm wearing lingerie." To which he was supposed to reply, "That's so sexy!" But instead he said, "I'm not a big lingerie guy."

"Oh." I leaned on my elbow, "Did you notice that I got all dolled up for you tonight?"

He nodded. "Yeah. But I like your hair curly. And I like how you look without makeup."

"Did you notice that I shaved?" I gestured to my legs.

"Yeah. But I don't mind if women have hair on their legs. It's natural."

I was silent for a moment. "What about their underarms?"

"I don't really care."

"What about bikini lines?"

He shrugged.

"I suppose you don't really care about pedicures either." I looked at my sad, shiny toes.

"They're nice," he said, apologetically.

I had spent the afternoon baking a cake for a guy that was allergic to gluten.

"You don't think it's hotter like this?" "It's" meaning me.

"Not really, but you should do whatever you're comfortable with."

Because that bikini wax had been so comfortable.

Over the next few days I tried to reprogram myself. It was surprisingly difficult to accept that I could be just as attractive without the help of Gillette, Almay, MAC, Lorac, Maybelline, NARS, Redken and L'Oréal. My ex-boyfriend had suggested that I go to the gym every day and only wear my hair straight, and that had seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Women are supposed to try to improve their appearances.

When Chris caught me putting lipstick on while waiting for the elevator, he made a comment about how I was reacting against my mom's feminist generation. "Are you kidding?" I said. "My mom's ten times worse than I am. She looks perfect all the time!" The same was true of my friends' mothers. My aunts. Cousins. All of my girl friends." It had never occurred to me to describe us this way before. "I guess we're kind of traditional."

"Or post-feminist."

"Um." It was embarrassing to admit. "I don't really know what that means."

"You don't know about feminism?"

"I mean, I know who Gloria Steinem is but not much beyond that. It's not like the history of feminism was part of my high school curriculum." Or college, for that matter. "I think of myself as a feminist, but all that ever meant to me was gender equality."

So my boyfriend explained first, second and third wave feminism to me. How the movement evolved from women's suffrage and property rights, to combating sexism, and finally to allowing women the freedom to define feminism for themselves. He told me that the girls he went to college with wouldn't have believed the level of maintenance my friends and I required, and made me realize how much the generations before me had had to endure so that I could think of myself as a feminist without thinking too much about it.

At one point he even sat me down and made me listen to the Carole King version of "You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman." I had recently made him a mix called "What The Kids Are Listening to These Days" with MGMT, Arcade Fire and Cold War Kids, and here we were listening to his dopey 70's music. It took all of my self-control not to make fun of him. But it was actually a very affecting version of the song.

I didn't completely stop wearing makeup or blow-drying my hair. But now I did that stuff because it was fun to dress up sometimes and not because I had to compensate for the discrepancy between what I looked like and what Victoria's Secret demanded. Glancing at my unpolished toes one day one of my friends said, "So now you don't get pedicures anymore?" She looked so sad for me, like I just told her I had to wear headgear for the rest of my life. I laughed, and felt a little bad for her because I felt the same way about her.

I had always loved flipping through women's magazines, but for the first time the articles struck me as obsessive, almost to a level of insanity. It was human to have laugh lines and a stomach that wasn't flat, but every page revealed another bulleted list of ways to prevent these things. I was disturbed by how much I must have internalized the criticisms in every ad campaign to have not even noticed them until now. For once I was living outside the youth and beauty culture. Those images were still everywhere - subway stations, taxis, my computer screen - 24 hours a day, but I was immune to them.

At the same time, I finally got what's so great about fashion. Instead of trying to dress in the most flattering way possible in order to compete with everyone prettier than me, I could take liberties with what I wore. I could get as dressed up or down as I wanted knowing that my boyfriend would be attracted to me either way. I could wear shoes with ankle straps, colors other than black, horizontal stripes. Clothes became a lot more fun when they didn't need to hide or promote anything.

"I hope you don't take this the wrong way," Chris said one day, "but you look older lately . . . and it's sexy." I didn't take it the wrong way. I thought it was a pretty cool compliment actually. I knew there was supposed to be something unattractive about aging but I had forgotten by then what it was.

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Tags: chicken salad sandwiches, clothes, confusion, conversations, dating a feminist man, drawers, eyelashes, feminism, first date, gesture, glasses, grey eyes, gym shorts, living room, long term relationship, makeup, newspapers, old friends, profession, roommate, self-esteem, sofa, wallet