My 36M boyfriend can’t keep a job and when he does he complains and misses so much work that he ends up eventually getting fired. Since we’ve known each out almost 10 years and have an 8 year old daughter our relationship has moved somewhat quickly with having to adult a lot sooner than expected when having a child. I’ve been at my same job for the past 5 years and 2 years ago I was able to get him hired on and we were making really great money together but as of July he lost his job and everything is on me again. I won’t lie I’m struggling and since the financial responsibility is on me I’ve made some bad finance decisions with loans, that I’m trying to get out of, which is part of why I’m looking for a higher paying job to pay off my debt I’ve accrued.
My boyfriend honestly hates doing anything on his own and relies on me like a big second child basically, and due to this I’ve known I’m an enabler of this behavior. When I try to make him do something on his own it ends up as an argument or a discussion where I just eventually end up caving too.
I’m tired of enabling him to not being independent and basically rasing our child by myself. I mean he’s 36 how do I get him to be self reliant and more helpful to himself? I’m trying to make things easier on myself by finding a higher paying job to lighten the load but I know it’s just to avoid and try to force him to find it on his own but it’s not a working tactic. I’m at a loss on this.
TLDR: my boyfriend lost his job in July and wants me to look for a position for him, instead I’ve started looking for higher paying job as to avoid finding him one.
15 comments
Do you want to be raising two kids? Does he pull his weight in other ways?
Is he the only man in town and the two of you have been charged to repopulate the earth and that’s why you’re tolerating all of this? Does he ejaculate pizza and gold bars?
At some point you need a partner not someone you have to parent and you are coming up on losing patience. I’d probably give him a deadline and if he doesn’t find a job and keep it, you’ll start looking at moving out or ending the relationship. He won’t change if there are never consequences. Is this the kind of relationship you want to model for you child to have when they are older?
>I mean he’s 36 how do I get him to be self reliant and more helpful to himself?
You don’t, hon. I’m sorry – I wish there was a more pleasant answer.
Let me tell you a tale of two 36 year olds I know. I’m one of them, and I’ll call the other one Austin.
Austin and I both struggled to keep jobs in our late teens and early 20s. I would work for 8-12 months and then get mad and quit. I usually had another job within a few weeks. Austin kept getting fired from his jobs for absenteeism, and would stay unemployed much longer than me.
Fast forward. Austin and I are now 25. I’ve secured my first “big girl job”, working at a college. My job is challenging and taxing, but I’m treated well and paid nicely. I go back to school part time and really begin fixing my life. Meanwhile, Austin is entering year 4 of living off his wife’s charity.
Fast forward another 5 years. We’re 30. I’m still at the college, having moved up a couple spots. Austin actually has a big boy job for the first time. It seems for a moment like he’d actually grown up. And then the same old pattern emerges. “It’s a toxic work environment.” He goes down to part time before quitting entirely, yet again depending entirely on the charity of his long-suffering wife.
Final time jump. It’s the year 2023. I have my own full time business and Austin is living off a lawsuit settlement. Apparently his money’s running low and he’s starting to bother his now-estranged wife about getting back together For SoMe ReAsOn.
Austin is magnetic and sort of handsome. He has no sense of shame. So he’s **very** good at getting money out of people. If his wife refuses to take him back, which I hope she does, he will just find another cash cow. There’s just no way in hell Austin is ever going to learn to carry himself, not at this point. He’s had endless opportunities and squandered them all. He uses his social skills to have others do his work for him.
Your question assumes he doesn’t know how to be self-reliant, which is nonsense. The reality is that he *chooses* to not be self-reliant because it makes life easier and more fun for him when he doesn’t have to deal with any of the responsibilities of being an adult. As long as you continue to enable him he will continue making that choice.
You cannot make someone his age suddenly become a self-motivated go-getter.
You can separate, file for child support, and potentially let the court system motivate him to provide for his child under penalty of various legal consequences. That’s about it.
If it’s been like that for ten years, he will not change. Just break up. You are not his mother. He is almost forty and can’t even go to his job by himself every day? Yikes.
You can’t *make* him be self reliant and a supportive partner/father. You either continue to enable him, tell him what you need him to do and refuse to hear any argument (which may or may not work), or leave him.
You already have 1 child, you don’t need a 36 year old one. It’s time to break up and do whatever you can on your own to become more financially self-sufficient and make sure your daughter is taken care of.
He’s 36. He’s not gonna change.
This is who he is. You KNOW this is who he is.
You want the magic strategy to make him a responsible partner and it does not exist. It’s not that he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t care. And he doesn’t have to care, because you end up doing it all. You think the solution is that you work more, make more, so that he can TAKE more?
The solution is not that complicated. Know what will make your life easier in so many ways? Getting out of this relationship. That is actually the only solution.
You cannot fix this man. The only one who can help him is him. He obviously has some issues. You’ve known him since he was 26 and he was 28 when your daughter was born. It’s not like you were a couple of kids when you got together. For whatever reason he is not a responsible adult. You’ll have to decide if this is something you want to tolerate or not.
You might as well be a single mom, since you’re doing everything, anyway. He’s just dead weight. You chose him, but you can also leave him and stop modeling a shit relationship for your child.
revolting. how can you be attracted? how can you tolerate this?
You can’t make someone do something they don’t want to do. And he doesn’t want to work. He wants to have you support him and do everything for him and for him not to have to do anything ever again.
You should want more than that for yourself.