Ranked: Who was officially the worst boyfriend in teen TV history?

Please, let’s stop romanticising Chuck Bass

3 years ago

During our teenage years we were all collectively in love with Chuck Bass, Ezra Fitz and Damon Salvatore, but you know what? They were actually pretty toxic men, in fact I’d go as far as saying they’re the worst boyfriends on teen TV drama shows.

Even though we’ve left our teenage crushes, there’s still been plenty of bad boyfriends in recent teen shows including Nate in Euphoria and Otis in Sex Education.

Obviously Nate and Otis are varying degrees of bad – Otis loves someone else whilst in a relationship but Nate full on calls his girlfriend a “whore” and chokes her.

There’s a range of bad boyfriends in our favourite teen dramas from Glee to 90210 to Gilmore Girls and now it’s time to decide who is truly the worst.

These are the worst teen TV drama boyfriends ranked from not great to plain awful and we should have been allowed to like them:

Otis Milburn

via Netflix

Otis has a lot of great qualities, but being a boyfriend to Ola is not one of them.

It’s obvious to anyone watching how much Otis loves Maeve, which makes it so uncomfortable and awkward to see him trying a relationship with Ola because it’s just not fair to her for her boyfriend to basically be in love with someone else.

Also when he does the clock technique it’s painful how well he thinks he’s done when he actually has no clue about women’s bodies.

Artie Abrams

via Netflix

Look I wasn’t expecting to put someone from Glee in this list but on reflection Artie was actually the worst boyfriend from the series.

Let’s start with his relationship with Tina. Though it’s fair enough he was annoyed at Tina for faking her stutter, it then was not cool for him to suggest Tina change her personality just to satisfy his ego. Who does that?

Then when he gets jealous that Santana and Brittany are getting close and Brittany apparently cheated on him, he goes and tells her she’s stupid rather than asking her straight up what happened.

And then in his relationship with his Kitty, whilst it appears to be pretty good, in season six Kitty reveals how badly he treated her when he went to college. Which is insane, have you seen Kitty? She’s wonderful.

Ethan Ward

For a guy that was only in one season of 90210 he did a lot to end up as the worst boyfriend from the show.

When 90210 first starts out he’s cheating on Naomi, is he mad? Then he starts dating Annie, which ends her friendship with Naomi, he has no idea what he actually wants but continues to string Annie along and then of course breaks her heart. Good going Ethan.

Dean Forester

via Netflix

There is a big debate amongst Gilmore Girls fans about who was the best boyfriend for Rory, but honestly we really should be considering who the worst was, because none of them are exactly angels.

Though Jess is moody and not dependable, and Logan is arrogant and a bit of a rich prick neither of them are as bad as Dean.

Dean, who gets married at 19 years old, then proceeds to cheat on his new wife with Rory and then when she obviously dumps him, he gets annoyed at Rory for sleeping with him. Sure, that makes complete sense.

But even before sex complicated things, Dean was very possessive and controlling probably due to jealously and insecurity. Rory wasn’t always the best girlfriend that has to be said but Dean always got annoyed at her over the smallest things.

He told her he loved her after three months of dating? Steady on Dean. And then when Rory was obviously not sure of her feelings they broke up because she didn’t say it back. Honestly, these fragile males egos – I can’t.

Dan Humphrey

Dan being Gossip Girl should be enough of a reason for Dan to be a bad boyfriend. Sharing someone’s secrets to the whole of New York in an attempt to destroy their life doesn’t exactly scream love to me.

Aside from that he sleeps with Serena’s sworn enemy Georgina and then her best friend Blair, which was on Blair as well, but like c’mon Dan that is not the way to Serena’s heart.

Damon Salvatore

I mean he’s a vampire, nothing about this relationship is going to go well. But let’s get into the details of why Damon is an awful boyfriend to Elena.

He tries to kill her brother in front of her, consistently disregards her decisions, attacks her friends and feeds her his blood even though she does not want to become a vampire. The phrase “dump him” has never been needed more.

Ezra Fitz

Yes he’s attractive, but let’s not let that distract from the fact that he is literally a teacher dating one of his students, knowing perfectly well how old she was before they started dating.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he’s also dating Aria just to get close to her and her friends so he can learn more about the other underage girl he was dating before she went missing just so he could write a book about her.

Ezra also thought he got a girl pregnant when he was in high school, but rather than checking up on her, he just let his mother pay her off. The kid didn’t turn out to be his, but that’s not the point, he thought it was and had no problem just letting her carry on.

Also those waistcoats are offensive enough to have him rated highly on this list.

Nate Jacobs

Jacob Elordi seems to have a habit of playing dick heads in TV and films. I don’t actually have the words for how messed up this guy is but I’m going to try.

Nate’s behaviour is straight up abusive to nearly everyone around him and his treatment of Maddy is appalling. Toxic masculinity is no excuse for telling your girlfriend she looks like a “whore”, telling her to change her outfit and violently choking her.

Maddy literally says he knows his behaviour is abusive and he agrees, and yet does nothing to change it. What kinda psychopath is this guy?

Chuck Bass

What was wrong with 14 year old us? We seriously thought Chuck Bass was the definition of a perfect boyfriend, how wrong we were.

Chuck has many negative qualities that have nothing to do with Blair and as this isn’t a dissertation on Chuck I will solely be focusing on his bad treatment of Blair.

His deep love is not redeeming enough to make him a good person, and actually we shouldn’t even count how he treats Blair as love.

Across the seasons he gives up Blair for a hotel, is verbally abusive, consistently doesn’t tell her he loved her even though he obviously did, slept with Jenny to get back at Blair (cruel to both Jenny and Blair), got physically abusive when she was dating the prince by throwing her to the ground and smashing a glass wall behind her and finally tells Gossip Girl all her secrets to get back at her.

Sorry but let’s rewind and tell 14 years old us that just because a man buys you peonies and macarons does not make him a dream boyfriend. In fact it’s probably just an apology for all the stupid shit he’s done.