“My boyfriend of 1 year is bad at everything and it’s making me lose respect for him.”
Ok so I am going crazy in my head here because I don’t know if I’m just the world hugest witch or what. Basically, my boyfriend… let’s call him Steve… is just not good at doing anything. Wait, that’s not true.
He’s good at outdoorsy stuff and is apparently pretty good at his job in catering. Aside from that, ????? For example, I feel like I can’t do anything with him that involves any skill or is even slightly competitive because 1) He’s a sore loser and 2) He NEVER wins.
When I stayed with his family over Christmas they had a Scrabble board and because it was snowy and boring of course I tried to pass the time playing Scrabble with him and I’m not even a good Scrabble player and I STILL crushed him every game.
Eventually, after a few, I just couldn’t play anymore because I had to spend like 10 minutes after every game making him feel better about himself. After giving up on Scrabble we switched to playing Sorry. We had to stop that, too, because I couldn’t handle the mental toll of continuously beating him at Sorry.
Another time, we went to a board game night with some friends and he couldn’t understand the rules for most of the board games and afterwards vented to me about how stupid the games were and why there was no point having rules so complicated no one could grasp them (he was the only one who couldn’t grasp them).
Other times we’d play casual stuff like air hockey or foosball which I didn’t think even required any strategy other than spinning the little plastic dudes really fast and he’d still lose every time and get upset about it.
I don’t care about winning, I just want to have fun and it feels like it’s impossible to have fun because playing anything with him feels like playing against a goddamn 5 year old!
But wait… this thread isn’t entitled “my boyfriend is terrible at games” so here’s some other stuff… his internet stopped working a while back so he called me and I told him to use his mobile data to download the troubleshooting manual for his router and see if he could fix it.
He didn’t manage so I went to his place later and found he downloaded the manual for the wrong router. It wasn’t even for the right brand! I ended up fixing his problem and then he ranted to me about how all these router manufacturers make their manuals so hard to use.
Like there’s some sort of deliberate conspiracy to keep everyone in perpetual confusion unless they’re a genius. I’m not a “genius”, I’m just capable of following simple written instructions!!
Also, he wants to go back to school to do a masters degree but he needs to do some prereqs including a math unit where he’s struggling with a lot of the material (but as far as I can tell it’s all stuff he learned in high school!?).
Lately he’s been posting Facebook updates about how hard it is to learn logarithms. My school covered logarithms in grade 9 and even though I can’t remember how to do them off the top of my head I don’t recall them being particularly hard at the time and aside from that I’m getting tired of being expected to be sympathetic when increasingly I just want to yell “WELL MAYBE IF YOU WEREN’T SUCH A DUMMY!”
But if I even hint that maybe he should be able to deal with his own emotions e.g. “honey I know you couldn’t get the pizza dough the shape you wanted but it’s not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things right??” I get accused of being unsympathetic to his feelings. Well what about MY feelings that I don’t want constant rolling coverage of every tiny thing that bothers you!?
BUT he’s also an incredibly sweet, hardworking person who treats me well AND his boss and coworkers all say he doesn’t just work hard but is actually really competent at his job AND he did pretty well in high school.
AND he’s lived on his own since he was 16 and kept himself alive the whole time AND no one else has ever said or hinted to me “gee your boyfriend is kind of a dummy” So wtf? Is it me? Am I the crazy one? Am I a witch?
Here’s what people had to say to OP:
cant_read_this
Everything about this screams “undiagnosed learning difficulty” to me. Even though he did well in high school, it’s not necessarily an indication that everything is fine. The way school curriculums are presented, teachers often “teach to the test” when under pressure.
You’re taught how to pass tests, not how to learn or make those connections. Most kids will pick it up themselves. But that’s not to say there aren’t children left behind who can pass tests – because they’re not stupid – but haven’t managed to acquire the skills of learning.
I have a friend who was finally diagnosed with dyslexia in university. I have another friend who did well in school but could not read until he was 20. The sore loser bit seems linked to frustration. As if he knows himself he’s not stupid, but the rules genuinely are beyond his grasp and he hasn’t realised that he is the only one who can’t get it…
annainpajamas
It sounds like it’s not his lack of skill as much as his mentality towards learning and effort that are unappealing. Totally understand that.
longobong0
This may be unpopular, but you do seem kind of stuck up. Your post is dripping with condescension, but through that, you can tell he’s a talented caterer, praised by his boss, who has managed to get through a college program.
He doesn’t seem to be meeting your standards. Fine. End it and let him find a partner who respects him, as you clearly don’t. If my husband felt this way about me and I found out, I’d be losing my mind.
Two months later, the OP returned with an update.
I’ll save you some scrolling: we broke up.
This is pretty long and rambling and probably not even relevant but typing it out helps me sort it out in my head so you might as well all come along for the ride.
Some more background: my ex graduated with a degree in biomedicine last year but never actually looked for work in his field, as far as I know. This didn’t strike me as a problem at first since he’s always taken care of himself just fine and he never seemed that enthusiastic about his degree anyway.
I spent several years after high school working odd jobs while I figured out what to do with my life (most of the way through nursing school now) so who am I to judge, right?
But gradually I just got more and more of a sinking feeling about things, mostly because he kept talking about how he wanted to get a PhD and become a professor, and I felt professorship was a pretty optimistic goal for even the most brilliant of students. But how do you tell your boyfriend you think their dreams are wildly unrealistic!?
So he decided he was going back for his masters. Cool. After I posted the original thread I realized I’d never really spoken to him about his negativity while we were both calm.
So I sat him down one day and told him that while I was always going to be there for him in times of real distress, I couldn’t take all this complaining anymore – about his coworkers, about my housemates, about his housemates, about losing at games, about the train system, about math, about arts majors.
(Apparently they “all work at Starbucks”… the one time I pointed out the irony of this he went real quiet and later told me I really hurt his feelings and to not strike such low blows in the future. Guess I missed a hell of a red flag!).
I told him it was exhausting to constantly have to attend to one crisis or the other and that perhaps he could benefit from seeing a therapist (in addition to everything else he’s also had depression on and off and I figured it was a good chance to learn better coping skills).
Well that didn’t go over well at all, he immediately accused me of not caring about his feelings and that he should be able to say whatever he wanted to me and psychologists just want to give you happy pills to make you think like everyone else.
When I told him psychologists aren’t licensed to prescribe medication he went silent for a while and said “It doesn’t matter, they still just want to convince you it’s fine to be a loser and everything’s ok with you.”
I asked him if he thought HE was a loser and he said he doesn’t think he’s a loser, he just thinks it’s important to stay aware of your flaws and punish yourself when you mess up, which is why he runs so much. What!? At this point I end the conversation because I don’t know wtf to say.
The other thing that had been bothering me progressively more is that he’s currently taking units so he can start his master’s next semester, but it struck me as kind of weird that he had to take math and science prereqs considering he already has a degree in biomedicine.
I’m pretty sure he graduated (he has a photo of himself in his gown on Facebook) but every time I tried to ask he’d handwave it away like he was hiding something :/ Of all the problems in our relationship this was the only one that made me feel like I might be nuts because for all I know there was a perfectly simple explanation but why the evasiveness??
Anyway reading back everything I wrote feels super weird because there’s a lot of crazy stuff and it’s like “well sure that happened… but it wasn’t like THAT!” But maybe it was!? After my failed attempt at talking I felt like a giant dummy for not realizing the relationship was doomed from the start, but I was dreading actually breaking up with him until… the BOAT RIDE.
So in my town there’s a few places you can hire a little sailboat for an hour and sail around on the water in the summer.
Fun couples activity, right?
Before the Horrible Talk we’d made plans to do this and he didn’t know I was going to break up with him and I was still clinging to the hope of fixing our relationship so we went sailing!
All went well for about 10 minutes until we had to turn the boat and of course turning a sailboat can be tricky if you’ve never done it before. As we’re trying (and failing) to turn the boat I can see him getting more and more agitated and I try to lighten the mood by joking about our struggles.
He replies with something like “oh SURE it’s fine to be terrible at things! Who needs standards???” and “I should have known not to expect to be good at sailing”.
I tell him there’s no reason he NEEDS to be good at something we’re just doing for fun and to just try to enjoy the activity, something that I’m sick of saying and he’s evidently sick of hearing.
Because it sets him off on one of his rants about how he can’t do anything right and people who don’t care how well they do are dummies. Everyone is a dummy. I just want him to be happy with being a dummy, the boat is stupid, sailboats are stupid, our town is unreasonably windy, etc.
After that he’s too upset to talk and snaps at me every time I ask him to hold a rope or whatever. All because he had trouble TURNING A HIRE BOAT. So I turned to him, yelled YOU’RE DUMPED, jumped into the water and swam back to shore. Just kidding, I only did that in my imagination. I broke up with him a couple days later.
Here’s what people had to say to OP:
traciw67
NTA. He never graduated from biomedicine. He lied.
azure275
I think the OP missed the point in the title. There are many lovely people out there who suck at a whole lot of things, but can bring a lot of joy and emotional support to someone’s life, and there are many self sufficient “wear the pants” people both men and women who can work with that.
But this guy just sounds miserable to be around. Sucking at things and being self aware and playing to your strengths can work. Sucking and burying your head in the sand and making it everyone else’s problem because you’re a child is the issue.
honeydewslaps
Oof I felt this in my soul. Not a partner but there’s a lady in an art club with me who is literally like this dude. Just constantly ranting about how difficult it is to do this art, why are we doing this art, no she did it wrong she has to do it alllll over again. This on top of staying glued to me asking for constant help because she feels helpless???
I’m like…chill, it’s art, you’re learning, it’s not a big deal if you make a mistake but she just will NOT accept that as an answer and just energy vampires the entire club. I can’t imagine being in a relationship with that jfc.
