My girlfriend and I have been together for eight years. When we met her son was …

My girlfriend and I have been together for eight years. When we met her son was 19 and living at home. That was nothing unusual of course, plenty of kids have to live at home through school. Especially these days, with tuition like it is, the job market like it is, and so on.

But then it became apparent her son didn’t go to school and didn’t have a job. At the time we had only just started dating so it didn’t really seem like my business.

Anyways, I tried to help him explore different options, brought him into my trade to see if it interested him, but nothing really stuck. As long as his mum was letting him live home rent free and eat her food he never really found the motivation to work and didn’t have the education to pursue the kinds of jobs he would be interested in (but didn’t like school enough to pursue those kinds of education.)

He expressed interest in animation and game design. We suggested illustration classes or computer science classes. Neither stuck. Eventually his mum said he had to pay his own tuition for these things because she was having trouble keeping to her own bills, because financially, she figured he’d be carrying his own weight by this point. So she hadn’t saved enough to keep him home.

I wanted to make suggestions like maybe she should require him to get a job or be in school in order to live home for free, but it didn’t feel like my business.

Now we’ve been together eight years and we live together and her 27 year old son is making our lifestyle impossible. We want to afford to eat out whenever we want, to have s__ without worrying her son will hear, and I want us both to be able to work fewer hours by not supporting this third person.

Every time I suggest it she just defaults to the fact that he had a hard childhood and struggles with depression and is her son and will get it together when he’s ready.

She and him tried family counseling but the general consensus was he lacked drive. Eventually the counselor said she didn’t feel she was helping. She turned down good money because the guy was so capable and regular!

I raised two kids of my own and I can see plain as day that this one will never get it together without some kind of push. I told her if he still refuses to work or get a degree then either he starts the process of moving out or I do because this is not the life I signed up for with her.

She thinks I’m asking her to make an impossible choice, being insensitive to her son, and setting an unrealistic expectation of him (the word “boomer” was tossed around.) And honestly, she’s the smartest woman I’ve met, so I have to stop and ask myself if I’m missing something here.


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