Love means both people being good to each other and thoughtful about the other person's needs.
Heteronormative culture means that if a woman is good at thinking about the needs of men she's involved with, men want to marry her because they think she makes an excellent wife, which largely means to most men that she strikes them as an excellent personal servant.
If you are a woman who is good at things that are necessary to make an intimate relationship work, good luck finding a guy who is as considerate as you are and will also genuinely support your career. They typically expect your considerate nature to boil down to doing whatever it takes to support his career wholeheartedly and having zero conflicting interests to complicate the matter with him having to ever make compromises or concessions.
It's hard to find a way out of that trap because deciding to be selfish isn't a fix. If you are a career woman and decide role reversal is the answer, it doesn't give you a relationship of equals. It gives you the same garbage most couples have, though the roles are gender swapped.
If you are a former homemaker who has not as yet managed to establish a successful career, most men will assume they can expect you to happily play that role and not have any career ambition with which to annoy him.
It's easy to see your current self and to some degree your past self. It's hard to see what you might reasonably hope or expect to become if what you currently are isn't something you are happy with.
Your hopes and dreams may be unrealistic, the proverbial pipe dream that simply has no basis in reality. Even if you feel it's realistic, others may not see it that way.
Your dreams may be rooted in having been a good student, which other people may think was long ago and irrelevant even if you have continued to go to school intermittently and continued to do well academically.
It's taken me a lot of years to even figure out how to satisfactorily say "I didn't always dress this way and I reasonably believe I wouldn't continue to dress this way if my circumstances changed."
I still don't know how to satisfactorily say "I think I could be more than I am and I wish you would stop stifling me by subtly or not so subtly insisting I stay as I am for your convenience and not grow towards what I wish to become."
When I was married, my husband and I frequently had the same pointless argument where I would try to say things like "If you were as devoted to our marriage as you are to your career, we could make this work." And he would say "But I'm sure there will be a payoff with my career."
Gee, thanks, bud. So you're saying you don't believe I'm adding any value to your life and couldn't add more if you gave me more?
Or I would argue for wanting him to be more willing to support my educational and career goals and he would accuse me of trying to sabotage the marriage by wanting to be away from him part of the time. When I would rebut that with "Your job takes you away from me regularly." his reply was "SOMEONE has to support the family."
I never could get him to see that giving up my scholarship and quitting college were choices I made to stay with him and I could have had a serious career too. I made better grades than him in school and had better college entrance exam scores.
He had a successful career because we both consistently CHOSE to support him having a career. I did not have a successful career because we both consistently CHOSE to support HIM having a career at MY expense.
I NEVER had a career, so since I didn't walk away from an already established well-paid career, in his mind I never "gave up" a career. Don't confuse him with the facts or try to get him to understand his deeply sexist and unquestioned assumptions rooted in the bass-ackwards, barefoot-and-pregnant culture ruining the lives of his female blood relatives.
And decades later, I still don't have a well-paid career and men STILL imagine I should be thrilled to be the little wifey and rescued from poverty and since I NEVER had a career, they just for their convenience think that's a non-issue and they don't need to wonder what my hopes and dreams might be and whether or not I actually have the potential to achieve them or if that's just a pipe dream.
I've had relationships to men who helped me grow. I never married any of them.
I grew because of knowing them and then we grew apart, in essence.
I've had "good friends" in times of need that I eventually had to cut ties with because they needed to be needed and liked being my crutch and didn't want me to be ABLE to stand on my own two feet without leaning on them. In order to be healthy, I had to ditch them and not let them keep holding me back because of their inability to envision a better me plus their lack of desire to do so.
It seems nigh impossible to both find a relationship to someone in the here and now that's healthy AND which can help me grow without that fundamentally destroying whatever it was they found attractive in me.
This is an important element of me having thrown in the towel on believing I shall ever remarry. I know I want a real career and I know almost no one on planet Earth actually believes that or sees that as realistic.
Especially not men who don't want to be inconvenienced by seeing me as a whole person and don't want to admit that they want me to settle for being a sex object who is thrilled to do the women's work and has no greater ambition than devoting myself to their personal happiness.