My girlfriend and I have been together for almost two years now. We were together when we both lived in the same city, but at the beginning of the year I moved away to go back to school. At the time we were thinking about moving in together. Since then we've been doing the long distance thing, I go home often to see her along with friends and family (its only a few hour drive). Things are great.
The problem is that we've decided to move in together, more specifically, she is going to move here. I have a lot of money, more than enough to comfortably support the both of us for a while, at least until I'm done with school. She doesn't really know exactly how much I have, but she knows I have a lot. She, on the other hand, has no money. She grew up extremely poor, lives with her parents, works a shitty part time job that she hates, and generally just doesn't have money to do much of anything. She was also unemployed just doing nothing for a long time prior to this job, so she is used to literally having no money to ever do anything, or buy anything she wants. My apartment is plenty big for the both of us, and I decided (not positive this was a good idea) that she didn't have to pay me rent or anything if she moved in here. Nothing would really change as far as my expenses go, which is the way I looked at it, so I wasn't going to make her pay me anything.
The problem came up when she asked me if I wanted her to get a job when she got here. To be honest I didn't even consider the idea that she wouldn't want a job. I would think she would want to get one so she would have money to do whatever, go shopping, buy clothes, or whatever for herself. This also made me realize, though, that she was assuming that I would pay for 100% of her things, when I told her she didn't have to pay rent. I confronted her with this and talked to her about it, and basically the bottom line is this. She told me she would rather not have a job. She would rather not be able to buy new clothes, not have money to travel (we get together with our old friends pretty regularly), and basically go back to the way it was when she lived with her parents when she was 19, unemployed, with 0 dollars to her name, and never able to spend money on anything. For the past year she has had a job that she hates, but it has given her money to do stuff for the first time in her life. She actually has a smart phone finally (she didnt have a phone at all until recently.) She has new clothes, she is able to buy the clothes she likes. Our group of friends get together for trips/vacations/whatever about once or twice a year. She has gone with us on our past two trips, when she has had to sit them all out in the past since she couldn't afford to come with us. I always thought in my mind that she preferred this situation, but apparently she hates working so much that she would rather go back to the way it was before, where she didn't have money to do anything.
This really really bothers me, and I don't know how to deal with it. She agreed to get a job, but only because I'm "making her". I really don't like that. I don't like the idea that I'm making her do it, I really want her to want to have a job. I want her to have a phone, I want her to have nice clothes and nice shoes that she likes, I want her to be able to fix her car when it breaks down, I want her to have all these things. It makes me really sad that she doesn't want them.
How do I deal with this? I don't even know if there's anything I can do other than hope it might change, or maybe I should just get over it since she is agreeing to get a job. Any advice is welcome.