Off-loading problems to DH

[Nunckybunchchuck]

How would you feel if a woman you didn't know seemed to be offloading her homelife problems onto your husband?
He has told me how they'll have chats over the phone during work time. The last one he told me about is that she's told him about a situation with her SEN child which I think is really quite personal, and I told him so.
He hasn't mentioned her since that last call he told me about.

Who is the woman, how does he know her, what’s the context?

I wouldn’t consider somebody offloading onto a friend or close colleague about their SEN child and the difficulties of parenting one particularly “personal” tbh. She and her partner will be struggling through it 24/7 and an external sounding board or just somewhere to vent and get support will be a good thing.

And children are the least sexy thing ever, if I was trying to get into somebody’s pants the last thing I’d talk to them about would be a disabled child. There must be more background to this that you’re upset about?

That doesn’t sound personal or inappropriate. How do they know each other? If they’re friendly work colleagues YABU, if she’s his ex affair partner YANBU

A mutual friend offloaded to DP about her SEN child two weeks ago. (We've both known her for 15 years, haven't seen as much of her as we used to due to Covid and other factors, this was a bit of a group reunion.) It was pretty obviously because we're almost the only child-free people in that group and she could say certain things to him that she couldn't say to the others.

It's honestly kind of horrible of you to make the leap from someone struggling with an SEN child and needing a kind ear, to thinking she's trying to come on to your DH.

When DP told me about what our mutual friend had said, my heart went out to her, but I also felt quite proud that I have a DP who's approachable, kind and good at listening (he's better than me on all those fronts).

I never said I was thinking she was coming on to him. But I'm troubled that she is over-sharing some really personal information about her DD to him when she doesn't even know him that well. He said he was shocked that she had told him this sort of stuff and I agreed with him that it is odd that she would have mentioned something so personal to a relative stranger. They've never even met in person. Familiarity like that can lead to misunderstandings.

He knows her through telephone calls for work.

If he’s shocked and finds it inappropriate and difficult, and she’s somebody who he barely knows then he can gently say something like “this all sounds really hard for you, Ruth, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be. You barely know me and yet are telling me all this so I’m concerned you don’t have much support and I’m not really knowledgeable or skilled enough to help. Have you thought about speaking to somebody in your HR department? Your company might have an employee assistance line or a peer support group for carers, I think that would be helpful.”

It sounds like the poor woman has nobody in her life to talk to about her child’s needs and has latched on to somebody who appears kind and willing to listen to her.

And I can see exactly how this sort of situation would arise and I think your view that “familiarity like that can lead to misunderstandings” is uncharitable. Virtually every phone conversation we have in the UK begins with “Hi Ruth, how are you? How was your weekend?” I can well imagine how, after a particularly shit weekend parenting her disabled child, Ruth might have said “not great actually Mike, I really wanted to just chill and catch up on chores but my son is disabled and would sleep / eat / had a meltdown which took me hours to placate. I feel more tired now than I did at the start of the weekend!” And your DH, who I presume is a nice man, offered sympathy and kind words and she kept talking.

Unless he misunderstands her and mistakes this for “familiarity”, what might happen here? I fully agree with you that he shouldn’t have to act as her unpaid counsellor and should tell her that he’s prefer to talk about work only and divert her to more appropriate avenues which can help - but that didn’t seem to be what you were concerned about.

Apologies. I've just re-read my OP and it's not clear.
I don't mean that people talking about problems with their SEN children is personal.
I meant that she described an incident involving her SEN child which is of a highly personal nature. If I was the SEN child, I wouldn't want mum telling a stranger about it.
I understand that she might need to offload. She has a partner but perhaps he's not very understanding so in that case I guess she needs to talk to my husband about it instead. Maybe because they've never met, she feels he's not going to tell anyone about it because they have no mutual friends.

I suspect it's precisely because she doesn't know your husband well that she feels able to offload to him. She might be wary of judgment if she was to offload to anyone in her life.

Which doesn't mean he's honour-bound to listen if it makes him uncomfortable. Just gently steer the conversation away.

if it was a one-off conversation, I wouldn’t worry. May just have been one of those things.

Its a bit strange that she’s telling someone she’s never met though, although something in the conversation triggered her offloading.

However, if she is repeatedly phoning him to offload, then I think that’s more worrying. She’s using him as her emotional crutch, and that’s when platonic friendships can creep into emotional affairs.