My (22F) fiancé (22M) has been lying to me for 5 months about his uni essays, AIBU to feel hurt?

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My (22F) fiancé (22M) has been lying to me for 5 months about his uni essays, AIBU to feel hurt?

My fiancé’s dissertation is due next week, along side 2 other large essays. We have been together since a young age before GCSEs and I have supported him through GCSEs, Alevels and now his degree. He struggles with being under academic pressure and never seems to start essays until they need doing, in 2nd year he handed in multiple essays that did not reflect his full effort just because he was overwhelmed with them. I don’t mind what grade he gets tbh I don’t think he will use his degree. But at the start of January I wanted to be supportive with his dissertation and so have asked him every week what can I do to support you, how is it going have you gotten a good amount of words down this week? Especially as the dissertation is such a large amount of words I knew he couldn’t pull it out of the bag last minute. He has gone to the local library every single day since January sitting there for 9 hours at a time. He usually takes on the cooking/washing up/laundry etc because my degree is more demanding (I have placements alongside my studies) so I’ve really made an effort to take some of the weight off of him, even though it’s left me struggling myself as I am also in my final year of university on my final placement(working 40 hrs a week with a 1 hr commute twice a day) whilst studying at the same time. Basically I am exhausted and ready to finish my degree but i wanted him to have no pressure on him during the last couple of months. I asked him this week if I could read through his essays and dissertation and he would not let me look at them. I thought it was weird but I had been on nights so I was too tired to investigate further. Yesterday I decided to question further as he still would not send me them so I asked what was going on. I reassured him that I just wanted to help like he does with mine but he kind of broke down went for a walk and sent me a huge message about how sorry he is and that he has been lying for months about the progress of his essays, I knew I didn’t have time to be mad I needed to be supportive so that he can try and get something written by next week otherwise he really would not cooperate, I applied for an extension for him and he now has to write 16,000 words in a week because he wrote literally zero words the whole 5 months.
I drove him home from university so that me and his parents can support him for the next week . He was also supposed to start a new job next week so I drafted an email for his boss.
It was only last night that I was thinking before bed how hurt I actually am, the constant lies about how much progress he’d made each week, asking me to wash up because he’s been at the library all day even though I’m exhausted from placement. He even copied and pasted 5000 random words off the internet into a doc that said dissertation because he knew I would ask to see a word count .
I honestly feel distraught that he felt he had to lie when I’ve been nothing but supportive of his academics.
We are supposed to be getting married next year but I fear that if he can relentlessly lie like this for 5 months what else can he lie about.
Do I have a right to feel upset? Am I going to be able to get over the complete lack of trust? AIBU to feel so hurt by this ?

You're an adult with adult responsibilities and you're expecting him to also be an adult, but he's clearly not developed past being a teenager. He's massively taken the piss out of you and cannot be relied on. You bend over backwards to facilitate him and he does nothing to deserve that or reciprocate. Do NOT marry him next year. Seriously question the relationship. Put the wedding off for at least 5 years and see if he can grow up in that time.

Get out now, the relationship doesn't work. You're his mum and he needs organising/mothering. Why would you want to do that for a grown ass man for the next 60 years?

I think you are doing too much for him. He needs to take responsibility and sort his mess out. He's an adult. What will happen when he's at work?!

I say this as someone who spent most of a holiday abroad reading books about soil and writing down quotes for my boyfriends dissertation literature review. Because he hadn't gotten it done. We are not together now and when I look back I feel very mixed about having done all work for him!

What about the fact that he's been pretending to work and letting her take the load of housework to facilitate this despite her also being in her final year and on placements working nights? Yes he's a man child. He's been taking the utter piss.

I have two kids at university. They have not shown me any work since Y8/9 ish I think as they want to do it independently. Which is as it should be. I can’t believe you are looking over his work🤯

But he isn't behaving like a functional adult. It's not about how he chooses to do his work - I am also one of those people who leaves work until the last minute, crams for exams, etc. It's that he hasn't been able to say "no, I'm not starting the work yet because I work better like this, you don't need to check thanks, and no you're not having my email info to contact my boss for me, I can do it myself."

Obviously she's behaving in an overbearing way as well, but he's also behaving like a teenager by hiding things from her etc. Both of those things can be true imo.

I asked him this week if I could read through his essays and dissertation and he would not let me look at them. I thought it was weird

This is weird. But not for the reason you think it is.

My kids are a little bit younger than you. I simply cannot imagine them being saddled with this responsibility. They are carefree at uni. I feel sad for you.

Good god op! Stop mothering him! Do you respect him at all? Do you respect yourself?! What do you think home ownership would be like with this man, him holding down a job, raising children…?! Don’t marry him, you’re SO young! You’ve got your whole life to find someone who you are much more suited to.

You are not his support human, you have your own life that should not be wasted on this boy. If you were my daughter I'd say forget him, you've outgrown him, concentrate on your own degree and leave him behind.

Sorry but why the fcuk are you doing everything for him? He's a grown ass man not a big baby. Concentrate on your own study. Stop enabling him.
And don't marry him. He's a liar and cant be trusted..
I've had 60 years of experience with men. This is a lousy start to a marriage.

But OP Says:
He has gone to the local library every single day since January sitting there for 9 hours at a time.

So it sounds like he's been trying to work but unsuccessfully. I'm not surprised he lied about his progress with someone breathing down his neck about it constantly.

She also says:
He usually takes on the cooking/washing up/laundry etc because my degree is more demanding (I have placements alongside my studies) so I’ve really made an effort to take some of the weight off of him

Sounds like this was her decision, not his.

*Why are you playing at being a 40 year old married couple - arguing over who does the washing up and checking his work for him? Why are you even living together?

You're a 22 year old student. Live with mates, eat super noodles, do vodka shots from a water pistol! Don't get married at 23 to a boy who can't even email his own boss ffs.*

I agree with this. Chill out a bit. I am a nurse and those first few years of being qualified were the best years of my life as I had some money to spend on gigs, holidays etc. Even if you want the relationship to work why not live apart for a while and enjoy being a young adult. If you want children you have years of motherhood ahead so you don't need to be a parent to this grown man.

I have been with my husband since our teens, throughout jobs and university. We trusted the other was getting on with their work but was never involved in each others degrees. We have certainly never, ever emailed each other's work. This is because we are both functioning adults.

I'm baffled, why are you doing all this? You're not his mother you're his GF, you're not being supportive you're smothering him!
I wouldn't do this for my DC when they're 22 and I wouldn't dream of doing it for my DH.

Also just don't do this to yourself. You're 22, that's very young. Concentrate on your own degree and your own future. Seriously think about if you want to get married so young. Especially to someone who sounds very immature.

It sounds like your BF is struggling with the workload and needs some help, but this should be coming from his actual parents not from you. He is also capable of sorting things like extensions out himself and talking to his tutors if he's struggling.
It may be that he isn't on the best degree course or needs to repeat the year. This is something only he can decide.

Run away. Seriously.

Agree. I preferred having a mix of tequila and tonic poured in directly - the fizz made it work super fast 👌🏾

Nope, she says he asked her to do some task after a night shift because he was tired from being at uni all day. Not her choice. And if it is - this is clearly a codependent nightmare relationship and she's enabling him but do you really think she started doing that all by herself? That's not how codependent relationships work. The person being enabled also manipulates and coerces the enabler.

In all seriousness there are lots of issues at play here.

You are overbearing and probably causing more stress.

He is feckless a liar and unreliable.

You should not be engaged to anyone you are so fundamentally incompatible with.

Well we don't know that he doesn't, we're only hearing one side and the OP clearly thinks her behaviour is supportive rather than overbearing.

We do know - he text her and admitted that he's been lying for months about his progress, and he copied and pasted a random essay from the internet so that he could show her a (fake) word count. Rather than just saying "I haven't started it yet."

I have adhd, and wrote my thesis in three days on coffee and no sleep, missed the deadline by a couple of hours and still got a first.

If someone had overstepped, arranged an extension for me and set me up with an obligation to write 16,000 words a day, it would have killed my creativity.

It’s a shit way to be wired, but it’s how my brain works.

I think you’re locked in a co-dependent dynamic and lying is only one part of what’s unhealthy here.

But I don’t know if I could get past him asking you to wash up because he’d had a “hard day” because that is shitty and disrespectful.

You need to pay attention to people saying you are mothering him because they don’t mean it in a good way. If you were treating your teenage son like this it would be really dysfunctional and controlling.

You also need to rethink what your idea of support is. Because it isn’t being a mug and doing every for someone.

I work in a uni and have kids in uni. You’re massively overstepping your boundaries here and you’ve pushed him into a position of feeling ashamed and hiding things from you.

We see this everyday and the fact that he’s done no work is not only not the end of the world, because he will have lots of options available to him but also it’s his business and absolutely nothing to do with you. He needs to speak to student support about this and you need to step out of the equation. Be his girlfriend if that’s what you want, not his over bearing mother.

The cycle of inactivity, shame, low mood and anxiety is very real with lots of people, students particularly. He won’t be the first or last person that student support speak to today in this situation - stop infantilizing him and let him deal with it.

I proofread my daughter's essays for her because she asks me to. I can help with pointing out where she needs to explain terms, or help with reducing word count with rephrasing. Entirely on her terms, if she doesn't want help she doesn't ask.

Agree that OP is micro managing her DP who it appears doesn't much want to be at Uni in the first place.

This is really tragic. Undertaking a degrees is about the individual learning to be independent and blossom as they take on challenges. In some ways any degree he obtains is almost obtained unfairly as he has you acting as his PA whereas his peers just have to get on with it. If he has issues he needs to discuss that with the university and student support services himself. When he has a job are you going to also do that for him?

So your sorting everything for an adult lovely but that's going to carry of for years and you sound a lovely, hard working lady who needs to think about herself