It’s absolutely unacceptable to throw shade at you because of your job. That’s just basic respect regardless of what your profession is. However learning to establish boundaries is important too. You gotta understand that a vast majority of people would find what we do on a regular basis as “gross.” It’s not at all foreign that he would be disinterested with the nitty gritty details of what you do at work.

Sort of a tangent but seeing as you’re a new nurse I thought I’d give you some advice. This will come with time but I think it might be worth putting this into your headspace sooner than later. The faster you understand that nursing is a job and not a personality, the better your life in and outside the hospital will be. Most new nurses i meet that get burnt out in a year or so, more often than not make the job their whole personality. When things don’t go the way they expected (or in your case, the perception you thought someone would have of nursing is different) it turns your whole world upside down because they linked the job with their identity.

It’s not possible to only have nursing friends and an s/o that’s a nurse. In fact that may come with its own set of cons that you haven’t thought about. Hell most nurses that have been doing this job for sometime hate talking about nursing outside of the hospital. That’s the beauty of shift work. We clock in deal with shit then clock out and leave it at work. We don’t get paid enough to think about that after our shift.

Grass is always greener where you water it.