Looking for outside perspective

[lovey97]

thank you for your thoughts!

[Batya33]

To me personally an engagement is not official without a wedding date or at least a wedding month.  I don't think he wants to be married to you -whether it's your job situation or whatever. I'm sorry. No one should have to be convinced to be married.  I was a teacher from around 1988-91 after college.  I too dealt with extremely awful situations in school environments and with administrations. I wasn't surprised AT ALL because many public schools are like that and private schools often don't pay enough.  Teaching children is very rewarding (I loved it!) and extremely hard - kids are hard to deal with and if you have a class that never is that's some sort of unicorn.  Not everyone is cut out to teach children.  In the abstract it might have seemed like a good career choice but you are finding it's not a good fit for you. And that's ok.

The buying a house thing is a silly excuse IMO - we're married 15 years and we don't own a private home nor do we wish to -we can afford it.  That shows me he doesn't want to marry you.  It's a bunch of excuses. 

We got married 6.5 weeks after we got engaged -partly because we sped things up because we were expecting a child but also because - the point of being engaged was to have a period of time to plan the logistics of the wedding ceremony and wedding day.  Get a marriage license/his wedding band, etc.  Had we not been expecting my sense is we would have waited for practical job-related reasons for about 6 months.  

Did you pay rent/household expenses while you were a full time student? It's of course nice that you do more than your share of the household tasks but isn't that because you're not working and/or working part time? I work part time now and our son is almost 15 so more independent but because I am part time I do most of the housework/all of the shopping and I get up way early to get our son off to school.

My husband works more than full time and on top of that was a PhD student while working full time for about 4 years until a few years ago.  But I also paid about half of all rent when I was home full time raising our son -I paid out of my savings/assets I'd accumulated. Husband didn't ask.  I wanted to. I wanted to contribute even though I was working full time as a full time mom to our son.

I think your partner has a lot of resentment and was likely dishonest with himself and you about all the financial help he gave you over the years and resents that you're still not working full time.

I too suffered a lot when working in hard school environments -one of the reasons I left teaching after 3 years - and I can relate to the stress and anxiety for sure - so I'd look into other positions/jobs that are not in public school environments and even if you two don't end up together I'd work full time or the equivalent even if it means side hustles for awhile.

Good luck.

[Wiseman2]

18 minutes ago, lovey97 said:

 For the first four years of our relationship we had an agreement that he would work while I went to grad school. Towards the end of that he got really resentful because he was tired of being the only one. It lead to a nasty breakup. 

Sorry this is happening. How old is he? How long have you been living together?

Unfortunately he doesn't want to get married. He's just creating hoops to jump through. He's fine coasting along with you being a housekeeper. This has nothing to do with "worthy of marriage". Please stop talking about marriage he's not interested. 

Please take care of yourself and your physical and mental health. Please continue to try to find a good fit as far as your profession. It's understandable that he doesn't want to combine finances at this time .