“My Boyfriend Keeps Failing His Classes, I Don’t Know What To Do”
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From a LW:
“I am currently in a long distance relationship with my boyfriend. I am 22 and he is 21. He has been failing his university classes for the past few years now, only passing 2 classes at most each term. Some terms he’s failed all of his classes. I feel really helpless because I don’t know when he will graduate and be able to live with me and get a job so we can start our lives together. I don’t even know how many more years it will take him to graduate at this point.
I have tried talking to him several times about changing his study habits or taking school more seriously but he doesn’t listen to me, tells me it will be fine and we end up fighting whenever I try to talk to him about it. I have bad anxiety and I can’t stop worrying about this and every term I have hope that he will do better and I just end up crying at the end of the term. He doesn’t like to let me down and I can see him trying harder in his classes but I still think he’s not taking them very seriously and only studying last minute.
When I look this up online, I see most people saying it would be shallow to leave in this situation and it makes me feel like a terrible person for even considering this but I don’t know what to do. I want to be able to start a life with him and know that he will have a stable job, ambition and will be able to provide for me (even though I will be working too, I don’t think my income alone would sustain us very well). I keep hanging on to hope but I don’t want it to be 5 years down the road where he still hasn’t graduated and has no job and we break up and then I need to start over, which I don’t want to do because I’d like to have kids in about 5 years time.
Any insight here would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.”
I don’t know where you looked this up and determined it was shallow to leave, but it’s not. You’re allowed to break up with anyone at anytime, and for no other reason other than you decided to break up. Stop caring what other people will say or think about you. You’re unhappy and he’s not even trying NOT TO FAIL almost all his classes? He’s a child and wasting his time. Stop wasting yours. There are driven guys out there, I swear.
Your boyfriend’s grades aren’t your business to worry about.
This might sound callous, but what is your boyfriend bringing to the table that makes all this stress and anxiety worthwhile? Being in a relationship, especially at your age, isn’t supposed to cause so much anxiety. What are you getting out of maintaining a long distance relationship with him besides an ulcer?
LW, you’re planning for a future with someone who even right now is not on the same page as you. Does your boyfriend know about this, about when you want to have children, or even move in together? If you have talked, and you believe you both are in agreement, then you have to see if his actions match his words. It’s not enough to have the same interests (e.g. I would like financial security), you have to have similar values (e.g. “I will apply my utmost effort to reach that goal” vs. “I will find someone who wants to bust their butt to make me secure.”) Does your boyfriend have financial responsibilities now, does he work, does he have any idea what role his education might prepare him for? If no, no, & no, he probably does not have enough incentive or motivation to meet the stated goals.
It would not be shallow to leave him. He seems the shallow one, happy to live off his parents. He sees a long university stay as his play time. He doesn’t want responsibility, hard work, having to support himself. He’s counting on his parents and possibly on you to support him. Does he plan to inherit a lot of money from his family?
It would not be shallow to leave him. He seems the shallow one, happy to live off his parents. He sees a long university stay as his play time. He doesn’t want responsibility, hard work, having to support himself. He’s counting on his parents and possibly on you to support him. Does he plan to inherit a lot of money from his family?
It would not be shallow to leave him. You’re looking to be able to start a life with someone, and you want a partner. You two are not even close to being on the same page.
My boyfriend when I was 19 (he was a little older) kept failing his classes too. He just wanted to smoke weed and party. I did break up with him. At that point he was 22 and had flunked out of community college and could no longer get financial aid (his family was middle class, no money to spare, but too “affluent” I guess for any more aid).
So then he made this dramatic step of joining the military. I got back together with him and we got married. He swore he’d use the GI Bill to get a 4-year degree. He did not. He ended up earning a 2-year degree, a lot of which was just job experience credits. Ok but he got an incredibly good job with his military intelligence credentials (and he was actually a smart guy).
Well then long story short he ended up quitting that job because he wanted to smoke weed and party. I know, shocking. I divorced him. Guess what, he’s still smoking weed and partying and it’s 30 years later. And he works at a pizza place like he did when I met him when I was 17.
Anyway. Break up with him. If you apply yourself, it’s not that hard to pass your college classes. Something else is going on with him. He has other priorities like my ex did, and my little cousin who flunked out (partying, boys). He doesn’t care about the same things you do.
I should add that during the 4 years he was in the military he couldn’t really smoke weed, because they would test you when you got back from leave, and you really didn’t have access to it otherwise. So for those years, though he drank, he had to keep it together. You couldn’t just not show up for work or call in sick, you’d get sent to sick bay for examination. You had to be a law abiding citizen who held a job. So, sadly, that’s when I saw his true potential or so I thought. But as soon as he could honorably get out, he went right back to his old ways.
My little cousin is now doing a course in fashion merchandising. She’s a whiz at sales, and might be able to have a good career if she gets some kind of business degree. Or she could be a realtor maybe. But like… who knows.
Don’t stick this out, seriously.
What everyone else said. You can break up with anyone for any reason. I’d break up with him. I broke up with my college school boyfriend because he wanted to follow Widespread Panic or something. I wanted to start a career.
I wanted to address the line about your life plan though. You said you wanted kids in five years.
You need to relax your timeline. Life doesn’t always work out the way we want. I’m convinced that if you stick to these strict life milestones like marriage and kids by a certain age, you are more likely to choose the wrong partner. Of course sometimes it works out. A lot of times, it doesn’t and you end up either divorced or miserable. Picking a good partner who matches your values is more important than meeting arbitrary timelines.
Do schools not kick people out for persistent failure anymore? The universities I went to did, so I don’t understand how someone can fail all their classes and still be allowed back. But I’m also “old” so things might have changed.
Anyway, while I think his grades aren’t any of your business and don’t really understand why you’ve fallen into this dynamic of kind of mothering him over them, you’re not shallow for breaking up with him over it. Not to mention, even if he was a stellar, motivated student, life often takes college sweethearts in different directions these days.
Lastly, if you aren’t already in therapy, I think you should be. I don’t think you should be this obsessed and anxious about your boyfriend’s grades, and suspect that’s just the tip of your anxiety iceberg. And I say all of this to you as someone who was absolutely plagued with anxiety the closer I inched to “the real world.” I knew there was no blueprint to follow after graduation and that terrified me. I wanted to cling to what I knew, and what I knew was my long-term bf with whom I’d talked about being together 4eva, but increasingly couldn’t see it happening anymore. We parted ways not long after graduation. Very sad at the time, absolutely the right move for both of us. Being in school can be a lot of fun, but there are very real stressors that come with that time period in life.
Good point about the anxiety @Copa
A lot of times anxiety gets redirected to something that’s easier to worry about than what the actual source of stress is. That is what my first thought with this letter is. It’s easier to worry about your boyfriend’s grades than it is to reflect on if you are actually happy in this long-distance relationship.
I’m with Copa on not understanding how he has not been kicked out of school yet. Most universities put you on academic probation after one semester of lower than a 2.0 GPA and if it happens the next semester you are kicked out. Have you actually seen his transcripts? This story does not add up.
