Husband lying about 2 female colleagues

[Changernamerjoker]

Found out my husband has had two younger (20s) female team members for three years, but he hid it from me and then lied about how long they’d been there.

I recently learned my husband has two younger women on his team. He never mentioned them, and when I asked, he apologized but said he didn’t tell me because I’m “weird about women.”
For context: we’ve been together 15 years, we both work full-time, but he’s in corporate finance and is basically unavailable on weekdays. I handle the kids and the house completely. I never call him, never check up on him, never question late nights (often 10pm–midnight). I’ve always trusted him 100%.

What really upset me was the lie — and then finding out he lied again. He first said they’d only been around a year, but I checked and they’ve been on his team for three years. He eventually admitted it.

I’m 38 and scheduled for a hysterectomy in Jan ‘26. It’s necessary surgery, but I feel like I need full trust in my marriage before going through something major. Right now, I don’t trust him despite his apologies. What do you think? What would you do? We’ve talked twice since Friday and barely any interaction since.

It sounds like the hysterectomy is maybe making you feel extremely vulnerable, and just as you would like love and support from your partner you have unearthed some information that's made you feel even more vulnerable.

Is it possible to stay with that feeling and tell him you're feeling vulnerable and sad? All the best Op. X

It doesn’t really matter how much other people know/don’t know about their partner’s colleagues, or what they would/wouldn’t do in their relationships, or whether they’ve experienced somebody being controlling and “weird” about opposite-sex colleagues. You know that you’re not jealous or controlling, and you know what his normal behaviour looks like. You’ve said he talks a lot about three of his colleagues on this small six-person team, so deliberately choosing to hide that he hired two women three years ago is weird.

He didn’t just think it wasn’t important, or forget to include them in his chat about work - the reason he gave for never mentioning them (suggesting you’re “weird about women”) was him telling you, in no uncertain terms, that he made a conscious decision to never mention his female colleagues, and that he chose to stand by that decision for three whole years. How much effort does it take to talk about work while making sure you never mention anything that references or involves two members of your team, because your wife thinks you work with three people, not five, and you don’t want her to know otherwise? It’s bizarre behaviour, of course you feel unsettled by this!

The fact that he tried to flip the blame onto you with his reason for lying, and that he tried to cover himself with another lie (saying they’d been working there for one year instead of three), plus the sulking as if you’re in the wrong for questioning his lies, makes me wonder if he’s the sort to consider himself a ‘nice guy’. They always seem to be the most defensive when caught doing something that damages their “one of the good ones” self-image.

Having been in a relationship with someone who’d lie for absolutely no reason, apparently to “avoid worrying me”, the pointless lies damaged my trust as much as finding out he’d lied for a ‘good’ reason. And being misrepresented as perpetually jealous, when I was anything but, was a red flag.

It sounds like you have a shitty husband and have had a shitty H for some time. I suspect he didn’t tell you because his late nights would have attracted suspicion if you’d known young women were involved. So he kept schtum, to avoid raised eyebrows.

Him lying is not ok but focussing on these women is a distraction from the fact that he’s a shitty H. You get the crumbs and your family life is very much on his terms as he participates when it’s convenient.

I had a husband who worked away much of the week. He would come home and never offer any insight into what he'd been doing, even though he had a lot of family near to where he was working (it's was second marriage). While I am pretty sure nothing nefarious was going on, over a couple of decades this really wore me down. I naturally told him everything about my daily life, and the fact that I would constantly have to ask if he had seen so-and-so really began to grate on me. In the end it did deep damage to our relationship. He was off having another life that excluded me entirely, and he may no effort to connect with me when he came home. It took me a long while to understand just how toxic this kind of behaviour is to a long relationship.

When you say you found out they’d been there longer than originally described - how did you find that out?

That extent of additional digging does suggest that you might be a bit ‘weird’ about his interactions with female colleagues. Which might have led to the not mentioning to avoid hassle situation.

It's not you who's making this an issue...it's him, by lying and hiding two colleagues he works closely with purely because they are young women. He's made what should be a 'non issue' something worth hiding...why? Why does he see these young women as a threat to his marriage, so much so that he's lied for 3 years.

I read about his work in the press. Lots of announcements of things he works on have to be announced publicly. Their names have been in the announcements for a while so I’ve known about them, it didn’t bother me he worked with women. It bothered me he didn’t tell me. I knew the year timeline was a lie as there were announcements with the women’s names in dated back to 2022.