Salon.com Life | My rich, beautiful girlfriend makes me feel like a loser

Salon.com Life | My rich, beautiful girlfriend makes me feel like a loser: "My rich, beautiful girlfriend makes me feel like a loser
In the great stock-market lottery, she won and I lost. I love her, but it's hard to hold my head up high."

This may not sound like a problem, but it is: My girlfriend is too rich. In a nutshell, I basically feel like crap all the time. We both worked in the same industry, only she's a stock-lottery winner while I was unemployed for almost two years, went broke, and finally moved in desperation to work in the city we both live in. She will not have to work for a very long time (or ever, as far as I can tell), dines like a queen, has a gorgeous house. I live in a small apartment and am ever the exhausted corporate cog, still financially making up for two years of having no money plus living far from friends and family. She travels everywhere, gets plenty of sleep, and generally has/does everything I've ever wanted or dreamed of. She is endlessly kind, smart, hilarious, and I absolutely adore her. But all the while I feel like a Grade A Loser, not to mention not much of a man. The envy and sadness eats at me rather constantly -- she has no idea how badly. Am I just a whiner or what? Please advise.

Cashed

Dear Cashed,

The way we feel has a lot to do with what kind of story we tell. You could tell a story about a loser, for instance, who's always been a loser and will always be a loser. Fate identifies him as a loser by his loser looks and his loser walk and his loser tone of voice, and fate ensures that nothing this man ever does will come to anything because he is a loser. That's fate's job -- to identify losers and send them appropriate catastrophes. But just doing that is not enough for fate. Fate also toys with this man for amusement, sending him a beautiful and wealthy woman who eventually will leave him, breaking his heart. The killer part of it is that even when she's loving him and naked and all aglow he can't enjoy it, because all the loser can think about, even when they're making love, is what a fucking loser he is.

Fate sits on the bedroom dresser and chuckles noiselessly at all this.

There is another story in which an ordinary man is trying to live an ordinary life but meets an extraordinary woman. He encounters obstacles and struggles to overcome them. He doesn't know why the . . .