Dear Coleen
I need your advice on whether I’m being paranoid about my husband’s friendship with one of his female colleagues.
This woman, who’s young, single and very attractive, joined the firm a few months ago and my husband has been acting as a mentor to her.
However, this mentoring has kind of spilled out of work into personal time – they’ve been out for drinks and dinner after work, he’s brought her round here to do some work and she stayed for some dinner, she’s met our kids and taken a great interest in them.
The other Saturday, my husband was out in town with our son and bumped into her, so they had coffee together and then walked back to our place and she came in for a drink.
She’s nice and I like her, and my husband is very open about their friendship, but something just doesn’t feel right to me and I can’t help thinking he must fancy her.
I don’t want to blow this up into something it’s not, but I wonder if he’d be so accepting if I were bringing a sexy young guy home and seeing him outside of the office.
I’d love your opinion.
Coleen says
I think you need to tell him he’s overstepping the line. Whether there’s something going on or not, it’s clearly making you feel insecure, you’re questioning his motives and therefore it’s destabilising the marriage.
It’s starting to infringe on his personal time and even your family life.
He needs to think about how he’d really feel if you were doing the same thing with a male colleague, and he might say he wouldn’t mind at all, but I think he’d be lying. The bottom line is, mentoring within work doesn’t ever need to come outside the confines of the office or a working lunch.
If you have a gut feeling that this relationship is going down a dangerous route, then you need to speak up. And if he cares about how you feel, then he’ll stop seeing her outside of work and he won’t make any excuses either.
He might have lost perspective, so he’s not being sensitive to how it could make you feel or how it looks from the outside. I’m sure if you mentioned this to friends they’d say it’s not appropriate.
Maybe they are just workmates but the potential is there for something else.
Emotional affairs are common in the workplace and they can spill over into actual affairs, so how long will it be before another line is crossed?
If he fights against it, ask him why he’d risk his marriage over something that doesn’t mean anything to him.
