AIBU To be losing patience with daughters BF?

[Moonshine23]

DD has just turned 18 and she has been seeing her BF for just under 2 years.

She is a motivated, polite, kind girl but me and DH have some serious worries about her boyfriend and we are at a loss at to what to do!

DD is off to uni in a few weeks to pursue a career she had wanted to do since primary school however she has been talking about coming home “probably every weekend” to see BF.

DH and I have serious reservations over BF for the following reasons but have tried to stay quiet…do we say something to DD?

He dropped out of college & didn’t achieve any GCSE’s (he was studying a course and a resit but didn’t achieve either)
He cannot keep a job, has not lasted longer than a month at anything we’ve heard he’s doing.
He doesn’t leave his house or do anything with her but sit in his house! We have seen him 4 times since they got together without exaggeration! She always goes there and was spending most of her money on Ubers before she passed her driving test.

The straw that has broken the camels back for us is we invited him to a big family meal for her birthday & he hardly acknowledged us and sat on his phone the whole time, leaving at various point to make calls. He did speak briefly to my DH who tried to strike up convo but he was met with answers like “could be better could be on a beach” and when he asked about what he was up to he loudly announced he’d quit his warehouse job to “work on his crypto”!! My husband nearly choked on his drink.

Do we challenge our daughter about this behaviour or keep riding it out?? I’m worried sick that we’ll never say anything and she’ll end up with this guy! Aib

Look, she’s an adult and she’ll make up her own mind about him.

That said, if she were my daughter and funds allow, I’d be slipping her a few quid when I could to make sure she was having nice nights out at weekends with her new friends in her new university town/city. Assuming you’re close, I’d also be travelling to see her every three or four weekends to spend the weekend doing nice things together.

Do not say anything!!

You’ll only push towards him more.

She will eventually outgrow him or he’ll grow up to catch up with her.

It might be a comfort blanket for her right now, she must be a bit nervous about moving away and meeting completely new people etc.

Once she starts making friends the weekends home will get more rare.

I'd probably ask her to consider coming home every other weekend so that she will have more time making connections and doing course work. I would hope that if she started doing that she would end up coming home less and less. She needs to build a life where she is going to be living and with the people she is going to be living with. Next year she will probably need to find people to house share with and if she is never around for the social stuff she might not make any friends.

And yes, the boyfriend sounds awful and he will hold her back if he gets the chance.

@Snokenyes this is my worry, that she won’t integrate into uni life & won’t make the connections for 2/3rd year! My own experience was you signed up for 2 year housing just before the Christmas break so it was quite fast & furious in the friendship department! I also worry on the extreme level that he’ll pressure her to come home and she’ll drop out altogether! 😩

I don't see how you can stop her doing it. She's her own person now

She’ll go to uni, have loads of fun and realise she doesn’t want him. They’ll have split before she’s finished first year.

I almost didn’t go to Uni because I was so ‘in love’ with my deadbeat boyfriend at the time and thought I wanted to stay at home with him. I soon met lots of interesting, intelligent boys at uni with loads more to offer and forgot all about deadbeat boyfriend at home. It will work itself out OP!

Yes, I think there is a way to get her to understand the importance of integration at uni without making it a boyfriend issue. It's not either or, but she will need to spend at least half of the weekends there to give it a fair chance. Ideally more as she will spend all breaks at home presumably. Will she be looking for work? If so, that will keep her there too.

I was also adamant I would come home every weekend. I didn't make it home the first weekend and it was all over a week later.

A promise ring? The laddies head is in the clouds and a brain full of magic
Your daughter is going to meet new friends ,different boys hopefully with a bit of something about them.

The home every wkend to see boyo will disappear like "sna aff a dyke"

If there's even a hint, make it clear that you aren't going to support her and they get their own place. Put boundaries in place if they expect to get fed etc at your's. But I agree she'll be meeting other people, who have similar ambitions and realise he needs to change for it to continue. Hopefully she'll break it off. She's entering the adult world, with nights out/festivals/holidays and it doesn't mean drinking, just different experiences, while he stays stuck.

How far away is uni? And who is paying for all this back and forth she’s planning?

Repeat after me, contraception.

She's a young adult in 2026, not a Jane Austen dependent daughter who can be persuaded! She will make her own choice, but it's not likely to be this dosser so don't worry.

I wouldn’t love it if my dd was dating this guy either. But there’s a lot worse out there and there’s nothing very concerning here. I personally wouldn’t intervene unless there’s a need to later down the line if she started skipping lectures (which appears to me to be unlikely). Let things play out naturally.

Encourage her not to come home so that she can get the most out of university life.

Plenty people saying they won’t last… but i had a housemate who I really wanted to be friends with but her awful,lazy bf from school who wasn’t at uni was always visiting her and just sat in her room. She eventually broke up at the end of 3rd year as she was accepting a job abroad… but she basically wasted her
whole uni experience with a loser.

id say… if you can go and visit her - stay in a hotel and have a meal with her one night,
but then she won’t venture home for that weekend. Pay her flights etc and encourage her to travel with uni pals. Encourage a year abroad etc. anything to lessen the attachment. Having said that… hope it fizzles out!

For balance, I did live with someone whose pre-university relationship lasted the duration of our time there. But she split with him shortly after they both graduated (from different universities). Everyone else split up with their boyfriends within the first year, most within the first term. In nine month’s time, OP, you’ll be back on here complaining that your DD has changed so much since going to University that you don’t recognise her and she’s driving you mad being at home. It’s vanishingly unlikely that she’ll still be with the loser,

I would stick with encouraging her to make the most of uni life. Tell her she will need to stay there at first to make good friendships. Remind her bf can travel to her as well as her come back. Maybe suggest to her him seeing uni might encourage him to find something he wants to do.

He won't last. My college boyfriend did last until the final two weeks of first year, at which point I realised I had an enormous and mutual crush on a boy who was on the same degree as my halls neighbour and had been popping in and out of my life all year. I knocked on his door in a ball gown to tell him so. That was 23 years ago and we are now married.

See what happens a university, it may well not last long. I would encourage her not to come home too often, in order to get to know people at Uni and settle in etc. but I wouldn't make it about the boyfriend.

Yes I think that is going to have to be the tactic, emphasise the importance of uni friends and uni life! I can’t see the bf visiting her as he won’t leave his house but the suggestion of minimum every other weekend at uni if he doesn’t get the boot straight away will be wise to open up her eyes a bit! We are more than happy to
give her a little bit of extra fun money to get the most out of uni if it means making new friends 😄

I wouldn't say anything. She's going to a new world and she'll probably grow out of him.

If he tried to stop her going however I'd step in. Once she realises the ball ache going backwards and forwards.. It'll probably fizzle out.

I'm all for OP's daughter getting perspective and realising her worth, but I'm confused as to why others are recommending that you chuck money at her to make sure she can go out. Is it so she will go out, get drunk and cheat on her boyfriend?

She will go to uni, meet people on her level and they’ll break up within 6 months. Try to let it happen naturally. My mum HATED my boyfriend at this age but I dumped him within 3 weeks of going to uni. I actually had already met my future husband there (who my mum loves).