Should he be worried about her not having a job if it doesn’t affect his finances?

When somebody in your life is unemployed for a long period of time, you sometimes can’t help but wonder why. I often assume that if someone has been unemployed for 2 years and still has a vibrant social life, their parents are footing the bill for their day-to-day expenses. Either that, or they’ve come into a large sum of money at an earlier point in their life, and they’re just living off of that. 

It’s pretty socially discouraged in nearly all societies for young, healthy people to be unemployed. If a young person isn’t working, we want them to have a good reason for doing so. If we don’t know the reason they’re unemployed, we might start spinning narratives in our heads and judge them based on those narratives, regardless of whether they’re true. Maybe a 25-year-old who took a sabbatical isn’t doing it with daddy’s money or her late grandmother’s money. Maybe she just saved up her paycheck at her last job so she could have the freedom to do whatever she wanted for six months! There’s nothing wrong with that. 

If you don’t know how your loved one supports themselves, it’s natural to feel concerned when they’re out of work for a prolonged period. The boyfriend in this story is concerned, not because his girlfriend is demanding that he pay her bills, but because he has no idea what her next step will be. Is she going to get a job after nearly a year of unemployment? Does she want to become a stay-at-home mom sooner rather than later? I guess he won’t know until he asks her, and for some reason, he hasn’t done that in the past eight months.