I am feeling worried about how my DP and I handle conflict. We don’t argue often but when we do, it often escalates quickly and ends up with a horrible atmosphere and misunderstandings. We have been together for 3 years and most of the time we are really happy and things are great.
Last night we had one of those moments. He started a new job 3 months ago and although DP is experienced in his role, he has been paired with a supervisor who he must work with and report back to constantly. The supervisor is a woman about 10 years older and is also married to the boss. From what I’ve seen, she is unprofessional. She talks about other colleagues behind their backs and is overfamiliar. Not sure if this is with everyone or just DP. She shortens his name to something nobody calls him, constantly messages him on the work chat and uses crude language in this chat. I don’t feel like my DP is encouraging this but he isn’t setting enough professional boundaries IMO. He goes along with her behaviour and calls her a shortened version of her name back. He says he does this to fit in and he wants to eventually transfer to my home country so needs to stay on the good side of management (we currently live in his country in Europe but plan to move to the UK in 2 years).
He took a work call while working from home
yesterday and kept laughing and acting over friendly. It irritated me a bit because he’s not like it with other people. He later said that the main boss asked her if DP was ready to work independently and she said no, the supervision must continue. DP has done this exact role for nearly 10 years so I don’t know why she’s trying to keep him with her.
On a walk last night, I tried to raise my concerns about the unprofessionalism
to DP but it quickly went south. He became defensive and said it’s normal for colleagues to shorten names etc and that I read into everything too much. He said that I don’t trust him but I do. I don’t think he would cheat (especially not with her) but I find her behaviour odd and overfamiliar.
I was a bit upset that he was being like that so I said ‘you could be more professional, maybe’ but I didn’t mean he’s unprofessional, I meant he should set a higher expectation by not using nicknames or laughing at her using crude language or slagging people off. He was really annoyed with me and kept saying ‘I can’t start a fight with her, she’s my supervisor’. Obviously I didn’t mean that but it all went into a big mess. I feel frustrated with myself too because I’m not good at saying exactly what I mean and if I’m stressed it comes out wrong.
He then went silent for the rest of the walk and was acting very cold. I got upset. He then went off on a rant. Saying I am ungrateful because he’s working so hard to make this move to the UK happen, he organised a city break to Paris for us in January etc. He said if anyone is out of line, it’s me because I have a male friend I’ve known since uni and he’s uncomfortable with it (I barely ever speak to this friend. He recently got in touch to congratulate me on my engagement and I haven’t seen him in person about 7 years.) It had nothing to do with anything and I said that. He replied that men and women can’t be friends and he wouldn’t have a female friend.
Things are better now because we talked it over when we were calmer but the conflict resolution in this relationship isn’t good. We were both raised in homes where conflict was common and so I don’t think either of us are good at healthily dealing with it. I regret saying anything about this woman. Maybe I shouldn’t have commented but surely if something is worrying me, I should be able to talk about it without him getting defensive.
We are getting married in the summer and I am on the verge of not going ahead with it because we can’t seem to see each other’s points of view. This would cause a huge fallout so I want to improve things. Does anyone have any advice on how to approach issues in a calm way? Or have any experience of this kind of dynamic and the steps you took to improve?