A wife has been left fuming after discovering her husband had secret meet-ups with a workmate. She stumbled upon the truth when she noticed a message pop up on his work system.
“A new woman started at my husband’s work about a year ago. They worked very closely together and would occasionally text, but he has always been open about the texts, nothing secretive,” the betrayed wife posted on Mumsnet.
She noted that the colleague is also “married with children” the same age as their own six-year-old, which led to the pair “bonding”. However, alarm bells rang when she learned they’d been having lunch together without her knowledge.
The concerned wife recounted: “He took a new role (same company, just a different team), but they had a catch-up, and she got tearful, saying she missed him. He told me about it, and I thought that was a little odd; I said it sounds like more of an emotional connection than is perhaps healthy, and perhaps he should back off.”
Despite her concerns, “they have been meeting for one-on-one lunches out of the office during work time”, a fact she discovered after seeing a message pop up on his Teams “saying she was looking forward to seeing him”.
“I asked him about this, saying why he had been doing this and why keep it secret if you didn’t think there was anything wrong,” she fumed. “I said I didn’t feel comfortable with him spending time out of the office, going on walks, etc, just the two of them as this feels like more of a date! I asked how many times they had done this, and he said two or three!”
Her husband defended his actions by explaining that his colleague was “going through a rough time” and that he was merely offering “emotional support”. The wife expressed to her spouse that she wasn’t comfortable with the one-on-one meetings, though group encounters were fine since “they work together”. She was also worried that she was just being “jealous”.
In a poll on Mumsnet, 89% said she was not being unreasonable. One user responded: “One of my friend’s husbands did exactly this, and he was 100% interested in the other woman. It’s a well-trodden dynamic, the selfless work friend painting himself as a hero and emotional crutch to her, but of course, ‘nothing more’.
“In my opinion, if you’ve got to the stage of telling him what he can’t do because his own boundaries are so s**t, then you’re wasting your time only to receive secrecy and disrespect.”
Another said: “I used to go out for coffee/lunch with a male colleague 3/4 times a week, often drinks after work. We became good friends, still keep in contact, went to each other’s weddings, and have been on holiday together. Never has there been any attraction from either side.”