Atlanta surgeon says her boyfriend ‘doesn’t want to work’ — but stats show many men share this ‘deal breaker’

Jessica Wong

Thu, Jun 5, 2025, 5:31 AM 6 min read

Forty-year-old Jenny is a surgeon earning nearly half a million dollars a year.

She called into The Ramsey Show to ask a hard financial and emotional question: “My boyfriend doesn’t want to work. Is that a deal breaker?”

While Jenny is projecting to earn $500,000 this year, her 51-year-old actor boyfriend earned less than $23,000 last year. He has worked just two days in the past 12 months.

The show’s hosts, Dave Ramsey and co-host Rachel Cruze, didn’t mince words.

“Is that attractive to you? Are you like, ‘What a winner’?” Cruze asked bluntly.

The red flag isn’t just the difference in income. Ramsey emphasized it was the lack of drive that Jenny should watch out for, “I don’t care if he makes as much money,” he said. “I care that he doesn’t work.”

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The hosts doubled down on the lack of ambition. Cruze pointed out, “I'm not mad that he doesn't have a job as an actor every week, but at least he's like, hey, I'm still busting my butt and I'm part-time here, I'm waiting tables here and I'm trying to make this dream work… but the fact that there's nothing in between that that's happening, right? As a woman who works and all of it, that's not attractive to me,”

Jenny also added, “We want to continue our relationship and keep moving forward and eventually get married and live together.”

But the surgeon also clearly had apprehensions about some of the proposed arrangements: “[H]e says because the house will be under my name, he shouldn’t pay for any part of the mortgage.”

Ramsey was direct, saying, “He clearly is an unmotivated slug.”

Jenny continued, revealing she has repeatedly asked him how he gets by without steady work.

“He’s 51 and I’m not sure how much things are going to change,” she said.

When Ramsey asked whether Jenny had children and she said no, he countered by asking her, “If you had a daughter that asked you this question, what would you tell her? You already have made this decision. You just wanted someone else to say it out loud. And I'll tell you, if you go forward with this guy, you're going to get increasingly resentful and increasingly bitter.”