DH’s friendship with woman at work is killing our marriage

[Teaandbiscuits123456]

DH and I have been together for over 20 years and have two dc all grown up now. DH has made a very good woman friend at work and although not an affair it is very cosy iykwim. Private jokes, DMs at all hours and weekends, breaks spent in each other’s company.
I told him how this made me feel anxious and upset and his response was that that’s just how it is and he can’t help feeling like he does but insists it is just friendship. That just about broke my heart and has made me question where I figure in his life. They’ve only known each other for 2 years.
Knowing all this I’m worried I’m starting to think I might be falling out of love with him almost as a way of self-preservation if that makes any sense?
All the time they are working together I’m not sure if we can get back what we had even though I wish we could. I just don’t know what to do.

That would sting, that the first thing on his mind on getting home was to message her. And not only that, but to say how much he missed her.

Sending hugs.

I agree. Consequences are an action that YOU take that come with a deadline.

When are you going to leave him OP? He is not a “good man”. Sorry if that is a little direct but this thread seems to be going on forever with similar advice being given over and over. What is causing you to be “stuck” OP - would you consider therapy to explore this? You (not him) are in control of your own life and future….does that seem scary for you?

Agree. And I think it is a scary prospect for OP to be honest - which is understandable. In a situation like this I do think it takes time for it to dawn that the man you married is no longer the man you thought he was - if he ever was.

OP’s been living with this for a while and has actually been doing something akin to the ‘pick me’ dance, hoping things would change, despite the fact that he’s told her in no uncertain terms that it won’t, that no matter how much it hurts her, he has no intention of giving up the ‘friendship’.

So OP is left in limbo watching the relationship progress and this woman get ever closer to her husband. She has no idea whether this has tipped over into a physical affair, but I think deep down she has to accept that even if it hasn’t so far, at some point it’s inevitable. And to be honest I don’t think it matters. I think his appalling lack of care or even interest in the distress he’s causing OP is more than enough for her to call a halt to it.

Posters are calling for OP to issue an ultimatum. Either he puts an end to the friendship or their marriage is over. I think it’s gone well beyond that point now. He’s allowed himself to get close to another woman to the point where it’s damaged their marriage, a clear indication that OP is no longer his priority in life. He doesn’t have her back the way a life partner should, and the trust has gone.

OP has said he’s a good man and a good father. She’s trying to convince herself that this is the case, but deep down inside she must know that a good man and a good father doesn’t behave like this. He’s been slowing blowing up his family and he doesn’t care. As harsh as it sounds I think OP has to take off the rose tinted specs, look at the reality of her situation and accept that the damage is permanent, and find the courage to end it now

I totally agree but it’s bloody hard. Hope you’re ok Op. At some point this will get taken out of your control & he’ll ‘blindside’ you that he’s leaving, having already taken steps to ensure his financial security (to your detriment). You need to get ahead of this & start prepping for the inevitable. So sorry.

But leaving your marriage is a massive thing to do, even if it’s the right course of action, so I can totally understand with the OP hasn’t done this so far. It never feels cut and dried when it’s happening to you (speaking from experience).

The tone of the thread seems to be turning a bit… impatient? But OP is under no obligation to leave her husband just because Mumsnet says so.

It’s her marriage and her real life; she should be left in peace to process and take whatever action she feels is right for her, including doing nothing.

OP, I hope you are OK and that you have some IRL support to help you work through your feelings at your own pace.

Sorry, posted on wrong thread somehow!

@Teaandbiscuits123456 i fear it’s only a matter of time before it develops into something physical, that aside though, his total disregard for your feelings in all of this would be enough for me to start withdrawing from the relationship.

Thank you all for your thoughts. It really helps to hear them as I feel as though I am being completely unreasonable sometimes. It helps give me some perspective. I admit I’ve been a nightmare to deal with when I’ve been upset about it lots of times over the past year/s and probably should have listened to his advice to ignore it but now I know these things, how do I forget them? Wish I could although then I think I’d be living a lie.

I have been worried they are still messaging and so I went to check his phone, for reassurance I guess. He has changed the passcode. I asked him why and he insists there is nothing on his phone but he was checking to see if I was spying on him. We argued - again. I know it’s wrong to snoop and I’m ashamed that I did and understand how he’s upset about that.
I honestly wouldn’t have a problem with him looking at my phone but I guess we are allowed to have different views on this.
Now I feel even more that something is being hidden. I honestly don’t know what to do anymore. He used to be my friend but now I just feel lost.

Yes I'm sure he would say that - suits him but why should you!?

Essentially, you don't want to be married to a man who keeps things hidden from you, is cultivating an inappropriate relationship with another woman and shows you no respect. It's OK that you don't want that (who would!?).

You don't have to get him to agree with you that he's behaving like a jerk or wait until you have proof that they've slept together. You can say that this, now, isn't what you want or deserve from a marriage. You want better than him. Currently he's like a dog with two dicks and his ego is about to explode from having you and this other woman engaging with him. Don't do the pick me dance, drop the rope.

Cheaters are motivated by LOSS. If you move out or ask him to move out an begin separation because you don't want to be married to a bastard like him any more then you may find that he has a sudden epiphany that actually his wife of several decades IS more important to him than a "friendship" with another woman and that he is going to show you some respect, prioritise your marriage and demonstrate this by finding a new job, being open with his phone, pursuing individual counselling to understand how he has allowed himself to behave like this.

What you can be certain of is that if you don't force his hand he will just continue as he has been doing. You may find that if you tell him you want to end the relationship and he has a personality transplant and reverts to not behaving like a piece of shit that you don't want to be with him any more even if he changes. It's a very common outcome that the cheated on spouse becomes the one who leaves in the end.

Get yourself on Chump Lady and Baggage Reclaim and focus on YOURSELF and not on him. You sadly can't rely on him any more but that doesn't mean you can't have a wonderful future. Unfortunately though he isn't going to help you get there despite the fact that's literally what he promised to do in his marriage vows. I'd get into individual counselling for you so that you can untangle your thoughts with someone impartial. Your husband isn't on your team any more, he's on his. You have to be your own team, but you can get support from other people and you can do this.

This. With bells on.

@Teaandbiscuits123456 so you’ve “been a nightmare to live with”?
Ask yourself why you think this. I’ll give you a clue: because you’ve been living the nightmare of knowing that somewhere something is very, very wrong but you’re not sure what it is and the source of it has worked overtime gaslighting you and lying to you. The source of it is invested in you feeling guilty about being “the bad guy” to deflect your attention elsewhere.
Your objections, fear, anger and frustration comes from your brain firing on all systems with its internal alarm going off and trying to protect you. When you can’t switch off an alarm, you keep returning to it to find out why it is activated and how to switch it off. Each time you revisit the source, to find peace of mind and an answer that switches off the alarm, you get fake reassurance that bounces off the sides and you are given what you know is an incomplete at best and a downright untrue at worst, reply.
Nobody is their best self when traumatised in a waking nightmare OP. You weren’t the root cause of it, he was.
You can try to live with this, sure, but that alarm will keep on ringing, not because you’re a ‘nightmare’ or ‘difficult to live with’, but because your husband is having an inappropriate friendship with another woman. As you live with the ongoing anxiety and upset in the face of what you know is true and what you also know is just plain wrong, he lives with being the cause of that without a backwards glance. Why? Because guilt left town a long time ago and doing these despicable things to you no longer bothers his conscience. He’s done it so many times now for so often, it’s just become a modus operandi, a device employed to keep you at arm’s length and allow him to pursue her unhindered with no consequences.
The choice is yours. We can’t unsee something once seen, unhear something once heard, or not know something once known.
It is terrifying to face our worst fears and conquer them OP, it is not for me to ask you to or to expect you to put boundaries with consequences in place. I would never judge anyone for the way they wish to conduct their marriage. However, it can’t be avoided for you unfortunately, this is a life choice now, and a big one.
Do you want this current life of worry, risk it getting worse and your worst fears coming true anyway, or peace?
I fear it’s not a case of living with it and hoping it goes away, I fear it’s a huge can you are attempting to kick down the road which will morph into a much bigger monster down the line, if this relationship which continues, unchallenged by consequences, deepens.

This is the man I wanted to grow old with. We have so much in common and despite how things may sound, he honestly is a good person and can be lovely company. This is what I am struggling with. He insists I need to stop obsessing and get over it then things could get better. That nothing is going on. But just because they aren’t sleeping together doesn’t mean this closeness he has with her isn’t massively destructive for us as a married couple from my pov. I couldn’t have been more clear about this through how I have reacted!
She wrote him a letter a while ago that I saw telling him how her life wouldn’t be nearly as wonderful if he wasn’t in it. She may as well have punched me in the stomach for the pain it caused.

Are you worried if you give him an ultimatum that he won’t choose you?

As much as he can be great fun and you get on well, the anxiety caused by this relationship with another woman will eat away at you until you are a shell of yourself. Is that what he wants? If he doesn’t care what it’s doing to you, then he doesn’t hold genuine love for you. You are just there for his benefit - not a person in your own right.

Right now it sounds like he doesn’t think there will be any consequences other than your unhappiness which he doesn’t care enough to stop. Are you willing to implement consequences and maintain those?

There was a post on here a while ago with very similar circumstances. In the end she told him to leave whilst she thought about the marriage. It took him a while to realise she was serious and he couldn’t manipulate her into accepting the unacceptable. Then he was full of remorse and regret and agreed to cut off the OW. But the biggest change was how the wife viewed her relationship. She realised she could be on her own if he didn’t show her the respect she deserved and would rather be on her own than deeply unhappy.

OP - we all know that this situation is very, very wrong. Your DH knows this too. I think you are, understandably, asking how to fix the situation, without ending the marriage. There's a very good post earlier today, pointing out that cheaters take notice of loss. You don't have to end the marriage, but if you told him to move out for a while, this may just give him the kick up the backside he needs? Or could you go somewhere for a while (realising this may not be practical)? But something needs to change, otherwise you'll still be in this position in 6 months time.

I have a feeling that this may bring things to a head. I get that you're probably scared of rocking the boat, or don't want to force him to choose, in case he chooses her instead of you. But what is the alternative? And if he did choose her, then this was always going to happen, you've just brought the date forward.

Is this woman still with her husband?
I agree with pp, you either put up and let this eat away at you and drive you utterly insane hoping she goes away or you issue an ultimatum.
a trial separation maybe
you will not force him into her arms as if that happens it would have happened down the line anyway

Unfortunately you need to realise that this is not the man you wanted to grow old with.

That man doesn't exist.

The man you're currently with is quite like that man in a lot of respects, but quite unlike him in one important respect.

He doesn't care enough about you to set this woman aside.

The brutal truth is that you need to let go of the fiction of the man you wanted to grow old with.

You need to decide to leave that fictional marriage. At the moment you're clinging to something that doesn't exist.

Only after this can you decide whether you want to get re-married, this time to the man who doesn't care enough about you to set this woman aside.

The man who actually exists.

@Teaandbiscuits123456 you have my sympathy, I have been going through something very similar the last few months. In my case they hadn’t openly expressed the sorts of feelings that yours has but it was a general sense of the mutual appreciation they had for each other and some flirting. Mine has outwardly been making an effort to make it up to me, even though he maintained throughout that he had done nothing wrong.
But as you say it is very hard to forget he didn’t care at all for my feelings and I feel triggered when doing family stuff as that was previously when he would message her, when we were on holidays, days out, meals and even a date night, so it’s hard to forget he was thinking of her on those family occasions.

sometimes I think I should try and move on, then I think why should I if he can’t even understand how hurt I’ve been.

I then discovered recently that he was tracking her on a night out and deliberately hid it from me and later deleted the messages so is still hiding stuff where she is concerned, so I would say if your H changed his PIN and not being open with his phone then he is still hiding something.

For me it was knowing something was going on but not sure what was driving me crazy, it’s no way to live 💐

Yes, she is still with her husband. No idea how he would feel if he’d seen the messages I’d seen.
I wanted to talk to her (calmly and with dignity) about why she was sending these messages and have called her number recently but I think she has blocked my number which I find interesting (she knows it’s my number not a stranger’s).

Hope you’re doing okay. Yes, it’s somehow extra painful when the messages have been after family meals out of on holiday etc.
Part of me felt like what’s the point in making the effort to try to forget how I feel and to have a nice evening together when I realise it’s made no difference as they are still rushing to message each other once family time is over.

So really you have two choices OP. Continue with the current situation, hoping things change, or doing something about it.

When faced with something similar, I was too scared to take action, and it all came to a head when they went on holiday together, and that was a bridge too far. I often wondered if things would have been different if I'd gone nuclear early on. Although I suspect not.

@PinkEasterbunny they went on holiday ! Jesus the brass neck of some ppl . My last relationship started with him already having an enmeshed ‘friendship ’ . I thought if I wouldn’t put up with this 20 years down the line why should I put up with it now . I’d have felt the same if the friend had been a man too .