He pays the rent, buys the groceries, covers the streaming services, and even funded a $900 shopping spree. But when he had to miss a birthday dinner to stop a cyberattack, his girlfriend packed her bags—and now he's wondering if he's the bad guy.
A 28-year-old cybersecurity analyst shared his story on Reddit's r/AITA_WIBTA_PUBLIC, laying out the kind of relationship standoff that no firewall could prevent. He works long hours—sometimes 60 to 70 a week—handling incident response and infrastructure upgrades. In his words, "the whole nine yards."
"I cover rent, utilities, groceries, streaming services, basically everything," he wrote. His girlfriend, 26, works part-time retail and chips in "maybe $200/month" toward their $2,800 rent. That imbalance, he said, wasn't a big deal—until she started complaining he was never around.
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"Like yeah, I get it, I'm not home for dinner most nights and sometimes I'm glued to my laptop on weekends monitoring alerts," he admitted. But after missing her sister's birthday dinner to handle what he described as a critical vulnerability with "potential ransomware exposure," things boiled over. She told him he was choosing work over her, and that "money isn't everything."
He didn't exactly disagree—but pointed out that money certainly covers everything else.
"I shot back that she seems pretty happy with our nice apartment and the fact that she doesn't stress about bills," he said. That made her cry. Then she left to stay at a friend's place.
He said he's feeling pressure from all sides. "If she wants more quality time," he wrote, "maybe she could pick up more shifts and we could split things 50/50 so I'm not under constant pressure to be the sole provider."
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The responses? Mixed, but mostly leaning in his favor—with a few reality checks. One reader replied, "Money isn't everything. Until it's not there. Then she'll really be complaining."
Others comments were more blunt: "She needs to get some hobbies or get a job with more hours."
Turns out, he's not alone. A 2024 study out of Dakota State University found that burnout is practically part of the job in cybersecurity—nearly half of professionals reported severe work-related stress, mostly thanks to unpredictable hours and the pressure to react fast when systems go sideways. Even though the study focused on instructors, the message tracks: whether you're in a classroom or a security operations center, there's not much room for balance when the job is built on constant urgency.
But not everyone thought his logic held up. "Even if she were working more and you were splitting things 50/50, you would still be working as much as you work. So that's BS," one user wrote. "What you need is to move on and find somebody who understands that kind of pressure."
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Another chimed in, "It's not really about the money. It's about your time."
Several longtime tech pros shared their own regrets. One said his marriage ended after years of being an "absent father" and "good provider," while another put it this way: "Took me a long time to realize—I work to live, not live to work."
Maybe it's a relationship built on uneven footing. Maybe it's two people with totally different definitions of what partnership looks like. Either way, someone's always logged in—and someone else is tired of feeling like a background process.
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Image: Shutterstock
