Boyfriend going to lunch with female colleague.

[boyfriendwhatsapp]

I posted on here a couple of weeks ago about my boyfriend. He had a conversation on WhatsApp with another woman that he then deleted, which set alarm bells ringing.

I’ve been monitoring the situation since, and another conversation appeared this morning. Basically I have gleaned from the conversation that they go for lunch together at work. He has never mentioned this colleague to me, and when I’ve asked him who he’s gone for lunch for he says, ‘nobody, I was on my own.’ She was quite flirty, putting all sad face emojis when he said he wouldn’t be in for lunch that day. He wasn’t flirty and replied quite matter of fact with her on this occasion, but the small part I saw of the deleted conversation was a bit flirty.

When we were discussing boundaries at the start of our relationship, I said I didn’t think it was appropriate for a man to take another woman out for sit down lunch/dinner, and pay for it. That I thought it was a bit weird and looks strange to outsiders as that’s something a typical couple would do. I was very clear with my opinion on it and he agreed with me. Now I’m concerned he’s basically agreed with me but now is lying and doing it behind my back anyway. As well as the deleted WhatsApp conversation with her previously, the whole thing just screams dodgy. Why lie about it? Maybe he is worried I’ll be paranoid when there’s nothing going on, but it’s even worse to lie and delete conversation?!

He is a lovely partner in all other regards though, perfect even. I’m not sure whether to confront him now or continue waiting and watching, as this may be something that is more serious than I know of at present.

I don't think silver is saying "different strokes*, she is judging everyone based on how she feels.

Upthread someone said they had been on a weekend away with a male friend. I would not choose to do so because I would feel that would be a bit much for me. However, that is me, I would not extrapolate that because that is something I would not do it automatically meant it is something someone else should not.

What should Bi people do silver? Have no friends at all?

I am having lunch with a friend's husband tomorrow. In a nice restaurant. Work calendars and locations meant it is convenient. It is in the shared calendar, DH noticed and asked that I bring him a takeaway pizza as he has to work over lunch but really fancies one from there. No angst, no jealously for what is perfectly normal behaviour.

Just because you can't have platonic friendships doesn't mean everyone else can't.

LOL I have a couple of friends DH can't stand. And my god one of his mates is a complete twat.

We just don't subject each other to those people.

Just because I don't like him doesn't mean DH can't be friends with him.

I understand what you are saying silver3

My DH has a running buddy who has recently started confiding in him about all her marriage problems. What was once a nice, straightforward friendship based on a shared hobby has now become slightly more uncomfortable. He is a compassionate person so wants to be nice and caring but does her disclosing more intimate details about her marriage make things more difficult? Probably.

I went for a sit down lunch with a male colleague pretty much every day for five years, he became one of my closest friends. Over lunches he told me excitedly all about the new woman he’d met, who he is now married to and has children with. Oh and he set me up on a blind date with my now partner. It literally could not have been more platonic. How do you know your partner doesn’t spend his lunch breaks talking about how happy he is with you?!

“I still don’t get why you think why anyone should consider as a priority the possible feelings of the spouses of their male friends any more than those of their female friends, silver.”

You see - there it is, right there. This is exactly the kind of attitude which I find either delusional, deliberately obtuse or disingenuous.

If you genuinely care about your male friend and get even a whiff that your friendship is causing friction in his relationship, then why would you prioritise your feelings over hers?

Why would you think for one second your friendship trumps her relationship with him?

Wouldn’t you be ashamed at the mere thought that you were driving a wedge between a couple and putting your friend in an awkward position?

As a woman, are you really completely unable to empathise with how a GF may be feeling?

Do you not care if you are causing another woman anxiety?

It doesn’t matter that you were there first. It doesn’t matter whether you think she’s overreacting / hysterical or whatever. It’s none if your business, frankly, to tell her how she should or shouldn’t react.

This is where I wouid differ to you. If I had a male friend and a girlfriend came on the scene for him, I’d probably be more concerned about how she felt towards me than how he felt towards me.

And no, it’s not the same as a new same-sex friend coming in to the scene and to argue it is is ridiculous. There is a different dynamic. Even if you don’t feel it, you have to accept that other people may well differ. It’s highly disingenuous and arrogant to just say - “Well I don’t have a problem therefore any future girlfriend / wife should just suck it up.”

If you genuinely care about your male friend and get even a whiff that your friendship is causing friction in his relationship, then why would you prioritise your feelings over hers?

What a strange conclusion to leap to, silver. Why should any normal friendships cause 'friction in the relationship'? I have several close male friends, all happily married, and there has never been the slightest 'friction' -- why would there? You may sexualise everything, spend all your interactions with men fixating on their sex, and therefore expect their wives to be obsessed with you, but I think that's just you.

DH has a female friend I don't much like, but I tend not to see her, as we're so stuck for night-time childcare we have to take it in turns to go out, anyway. No 'friction' at all. In fact, he's not wild about a close female friend of mine, but again, I tend to see her alone. Equally no friction.

If I had a male friend and a girlfriend came on the scene for him, I’d probably be more concerned about how she felt towards me than how he felt towards me.

I think that is the weirdest, most insecure thing I've read in some time on here. You'd be more concerned about the feelings of a complete stranger who might go on to marry your friend and also become a good friend of yours, sure, but who might also disappear after a few weeks! than about the feelings of an established friend?

You seem to default to the notion that men only have space for one woman in their lives, and that it's some kind of innately adversarial 'women catfighting over the man' thing.

Which would be funny if it wasn't also kind of sad.

Do you genuinely not know any women who are uncomplicatedly friends with me and vice versa?

Friends with MEN, not with 'me'.

I think that YABU and also YANBU!

It is unreasonable to restrict your partner from having lunch with colleagues, male or female. He's a grown man and can have lunch with whomever he likes. Setting unreasonable conditions to a relationships is a really good way of ensuring that you are lied to.

It is reasonable to expect your partner not to flirt with other people at work or on social media. I think it's also reasonable to have a degree of transparency in your relationship that means that everything is above board. (DH has access to all my social media accounts and vice versa.)

If you say you’re in an uncomplicated friendship with a man / men then far be it from me to say otherwise.

But just because YOU feel that way, does not mean that any potential girlfriend will automatically feel the same.

She may well do, in which case, fine. But if your male friend is telling you his girlfriend is insecure about your friendship or you sense that in some way, what do you do? Do you plough on as if she’s insignificant - “Nothing going on here, get over it.” Or do you show some sensitivity and ability to think outside your own bubble and back off?

I personally would back off. If, in the fullness of time, the GF turns out to be psycho, then so be it and time will tell, but what I am saying is, I wouldn’t want to be the meat in the sandwich while they work this out.

@downcasteyes he wasn't flirting with women on social media.

The OP said she saw his replies on Whatsapp and they were fine.

@silver3 I get what you're saying in your last post. The others I don't really agree with but with this I get it.

In this case, the work colleague will have no idea how the OP feels and neither does her partner because she hasn't told him. If I was friends with a male and his gf was insecure then I'd try and make friends with her as well, get to know her a bit and include her in things.

Men and women can be friends however I wouldn't want to cause anyone any problems in their relationship if they are female or male. I do get that some women are insecure if their partner has a female friend, I don't agree with it however I would try and include her so she hopefully feels a bit more secure that I'm not after her man.

Actually, @WhenISnappedAndFarted, she said he wasn't flirty in the second conversation but 'the small part I saw of the deleted [i.e. first] conversation was a bit flirty'.

silver3

Is that not how abusers work? Isolate people from their friends so that they have no one to turn to when it gets bad?

I don't think anyone should ditch their friends because a partner demands it.

@downcasteyes I'm pretty sure she said that was because there were emojis there, which generally aren't flirty.

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. There just seem to be a lot of assumptions (like that he's paid) and not a lot of basis for it.

I knew someone would bring up the abuser issue, but it doesn’t need to be at this level at all.

Personally, if my DH didn’t want me hanging out with an individual man, then I would respect that - and vice versa. Neither of us ate abusibe in any shape or form. We just prioritise each other and our DC and would expect everyone else to be doing the same really.

No, that was the second conversation @WhenISnappedAndFarted - the woman wrote a lot of emojis when he said he couldn't make lunch. OP said that the first conversation (the deleted one) was more flirty in tone.

All the info is in the first post.

@silver you honestly have the weirdest ideas about men and women.

I met my now DH, he has a good female friend he used to work with and stayed in touch with. There is a few of them in the group but my DH and this girl are best at staying in contact. When we started dating he’d say ‘I’m off to meet X for a few drinks’. I said have a nice time and when he got back asked him whether X had any news. They’re friends!!!! It’s normal!! This girl was at the funeral for my DH mother, she knows about our infertility struggles. She is a good friend and only the other day I was saying you haven’t seen X in a while you just get onto her to go for a few drinks.

However you are saying that the minute I came on the scene (even though X is happily married ) she should’ve just left my DH life - and he would’ve missed out on that good friendship for the past 6 years We’ve been together.

I think you need to accept that you have a problem whereby you can’t disentangle sex from your interactions with men meaning you can’t be friends with them and can’t understand people having platonic friendships. Most people aren’t like this.

No I’m not saying she should have left his life just like that.

This is the problem on MN. People over-simplify everything.

However, for the sake of argument , if you had been very insecure about her for whatever reason, then hopefully she could have been sensitive to that, rather than just ploughing ahead like a bull in a china shop.

I think people who are insecure need to work on their insecurities as their problem. They can ask for a bit of support from others in so doing, including strangers. But being anxious and lacking in self-worth doesn't give you the right to be controlling!

But if your male friend is telling you his girlfriend is insecure about your friendship or you sense that in some way, what do you do?

silver, with all due respect, you say yourself that you have no male friends. I am 46, and have half a lifetime of friendships with men (as well as women, obviously) under my belt, and I have literally never had this happen. We've all been married for aeons, and are either friends with one another's spouses/partners too, or simply don't see them because the friendships tend to operate one-on-one or at work.

AnnaSteen's response seems perfectly normal to me.

If my husband 'didn't want me hanging out with an individual man', I would think he'd lost his mind, frankly. It would be a different matter, obviously, if a particular friendship was massively impacting on family time, but that's presumably not what we're talking about here.

I think it's healthy for both people in a marriage to have good friends -- and it certainly makes for a stronger marriage, in my experience, if you are also being supported by other good friendships.

Ok here’s an example from my life. When I met DH, I was in my early 20s, he was 30 and he didn’t really have many female friends (or none I can really remember) because he worked in options trading which was almost exclusively male at that time, plus his hobbies were not ones women gravitate to, plus he’d been in a sector of military before that where women weren’t allowed. I went to various banking dinners etc with him and, to be honest, found them quite intimidating because I felt as if I existed in a different world.

There was one woman who was more DH’s age who I got s very definite “vibe” from, yet she always made a point of telling me how DH and her were “just good friends” etc. To be honest, I found it quite odd and a little patronising. In groups she would always be talking about “looking forward to Switzerland” or some deal or whatever that excluded me joining in the conversation. She was an attractive woman too, obviously very savvy and I found her a bit intimidating, but I just went with it.

Until one evening, there was a dinner and we were sat around a table of about ten people, all from that bank. She had kept making pointed comments to me along the lines of, “your very glamorous job...” or words to that effect. Then she came right out and asked me across the table, “Are you never worried that you might bump into a client at these events.”

Basically, she had inferred from the fact I was a dancer, that I was a stripper! In fact, I have never done stripping, not even “on the side”, as she implied. I was in a ballet at the time. So DH put her straight, but imagine how I felt.

So, if course, she continued to go on about “friendship” etc and be all apologetic, but I’m giving this as an example of how women who claim to be your partner’s friends can be destructive and the best thing is to cut them loose. If DH hadn’t have done so, she would have driven a wedge between us.

The whole free access to each others phone is weird, and just a cop out way of trying to justify your snooping!

My DP of 5 years knows the code to my phone (tbh he's probably forgotten) because I've asked him to quickly send a message whilst I've been driving, or he's wanted to see a photo or whatever. I leave my phone lying around all the time. If he used that opportunity to
go through my phone and read my messages....that's not ok! I have absolutely nothing to hide but that is an incredible breach of trust and privacy. Yes, he has my pass code....that does not make it ok to use it to check up on me. It's a shitty, shitty thing to do!!

We just prioritise each other and our DC and would expect everyone else to be doing the same really.

See, this is the problem I and I imagine other posters have with you silver3. You have this nasty judgment that us who have friends of the opposite sex don't respect our partners/husbands? Where the hell do you get off making sweeping statements like that? You know, we aren't all as insecure, distrusting and sexually motivated as you seem to be.

but I’m giving this as an example of how women who claim to be your partner’s friends can be destructive and the best thing is to cut them loose.

But you are giving one example that you had and deciding that is what happens to every different sex friendship? Can you not see how ridiculous that is? Its like saying "I once watched a Romantic comedy film and I didn't like it, therefore all romantic comedy films are horrible and everyone who watches them have really bad taste."

So if you had a male friend who your DH really took exception to Grey, what would you do?