I think it’s completely normal to want to be friendly and close with your coworkers, since you spend a large portion of your time with them. But what happens when that friendship seems to cross a line, or at the very least, makes your spouse uncomfortable?
This 30-year-old woman and her 30-year-old husband have spent the last eight years together, and they have encountered their struggles along the way, but she genuinely loves her husband.
They have three children, and ever since she gave birth to her second child, she’s been battling postpartum depression, which really got worse with her third child. She has been in therapy, which helps, but she does still have moments where she feels pretty terrible.
Over the weekend, she was creating a piece of art and noticed how late into the night it was getting, so she got up to see if her husband had gone to sleep.
There he was, passed out on the couch, and he had his phone open to a conversation with one of his female coworkers.
“So I snooped, even though now I wish I [hadn’t] because of the emotional turmoil all of this has put me in. As I scrolled, I realized that he and his female coworker have been texting each other every day for at least the past month and have also started going to the gym together,” she explained.
“The messages haven’t been flirty in any way, and I honestly don’t believe that he is cheating on me, so that’s not really where my issue is coming from.”
She looked at the conversation and saw that her husband was being nothing but sweet and supportive to his coworker. He wrote that she was an amazing mom who deserved the world.
What she found so upsetting is that her husband treats her the exact opposite: he’s always irritated when she feels sad or depressed.
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If her husband comes home from work and the house is a mess, he gets mad at her, even though it’s hard for her to manage chores and two toddlers on a daily basis.
“I make sure he has dinner ready and he and the kids are taken care of, and the important things are clean, but there’s still sometimes a visible mess of the things the kids have been doing all day,” she added.
“He hasn’t gotten me anything for Christmas, our anniversary, or my birthday, hasn’t taken me out for dates or anything in a long time. When I tell him I need more love and attention, he tells me I’m exhausting him. He tells me that dealing with my postpartum depression is too much for him and draining him.”
“I also saw that he vented to her about the fight we had just had and the issues in our marriage. Making a joke of ‘If you see me buying a new house soon, you’ll know why.'”
She ultimately confronted her husband over the messages to his coworker, and she let him know that she felt uneasy with him speaking to this woman every single day and being supportive of her while not investing proper time into their marriage.
She additionally feels upset that her husband has been keeping his convos a secret, along with meeting up with his coworker to spend time with her.
Her husband replied that she should simply trust that he won’t have an affair, and he stated that he wasn’t trying to be so friendly to his coworker.
“He doubled down on saying that my emotional ups and downs are exhausting him. Then said that he loves me and wouldn’t still be here through it all if he didn’t,” she continued.
“The very next morning, he went and spent 4 hours at the gym with his female friend. I was furious and honestly still am, seeing as how this has continued all week. Still texting and calling her, still going to the gym with her.”
“We have had this conversation multiple times with the same outcome. I’m still uncomfortable with the friendship, and he’s still unwilling to change it. I’m not sure how to proceed, but I am so unhappy about this situation.”
I think she’s trying too hard to fix the wrong things. Clearly, there’s a part of him that’s already gone: the part that sees her pain and still chooses to ignore her.
I don’t think she should wait around for him to betray her in a way people will finally agree counts. This already does, because he’s acting like his coworker’s biggest cheerleader while treating her like trash.
What advice do you have for her?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
