Colleague’s wife upset about our friendship, am I being naive?

[Bingowashisnameoh1]

I have a fabulous, kind colleague at work, he’s great fun to be with and I feel very lucky that we are friends. We share lots in common and could honestly natter for hours. There are many other lovely people in the department who are good friends too. It’s not exclusive.
Out of the blue his wife called me late one evening, I didn’t answer and there was no message. I assumed from his wife as the caller profile photo was of the two of them. We have never met so it was odd that she would even have my number. I spoke with him about this and he explained she’s been upset about our friendship for a while and had seen some of our messages.
I’m happily married and have no intention of leaving my family. I understand how she must feel and I’m sorry, but it really it is just friendship. There is no physical attraction there. Friends have always been very important to me and I think in life when you find such a friend, it’s a rare thing and their gender shouldn’t matter.
I have confided in a friend and she thinks I am playing with fire. Am I being naive?

Might be no attraction on your side, but he’s a man lets face it.

If the colleague’s wife has no problems with her husband’s other female friends - just with OP - she’s seeing something specifically in this friendship that’s worrying her. Even if OP knew she’d behaved impeccably and he’d have to be mad to think she was being anything other than appropriately friendly…shouldn’t his wife’s reaction be a red flag that he might think it was more than platonic?

I’ve been (sort of) naive in the past. I was friendly with a male colleague I’d worked with for a while, just chatting in the office and going to the pub as part of a group - everything seemed totally above board. One day we had our break at the same time and he suggested we grab some lunch together. As we left the office he told me, conspiratorially, that his wife would be upset if she knew he was having lunch with me…and alarm bells started going off in my head.

1. He’d sought out an opportunity for time alone with me despite knowing it would hurt his wife’s feelings. In telling me this he’d shared details of tension in his marriage, and attempted to make me complicit in doing something that was clearly not as ‘above-board’ as I’d thought.
2. By manufacturing a situation where we talked about his wife behind her back, and spent time together without her knowledge, he was trying to create an ‘us’ bubble with his wife on the outside of it, and
3. I realised for him to know she’d have a problem with us getting lunch together, she’d already raised concerns about me (suggesting he’d been saying or doing something that set off her spidey senses).

I was more careful around him after that. He quickly lost interest in being ‘friends’ with me and turned his attention to another woman in the office. I’d done nothing wrong - but his wife was right to be worried, because his interest in me was not platonic. I was mortified at the thought I might have inadvertently done something to give him the wrong idea, or that it might have ever looked like I was encouraging/enjoying his attention.

As it is, OP knows she’s not behaving entirely appropriately. She understands why some of the messages she’s sent would upset her colleague’s wife, she’s been told by a friend that she’s playing with fire, she hasn’t yet mentioned this out-of-the-blue phone call to her own DH, and she’s reluctant to share a summary of the more questionable messages she’s sent on here. I’d understand if this was an embarrassed “oh shit, I might have given the wrong impression” reaction - but if that was the case OP would want to change how she’s communicating to avoid looking like she’s flirting. She’s not doing that, she’s trying to find ways to justify continuing exactly as she is.

Once you’ve been made aware other people think it looks like you’re flirting, or you’ve been told that he might have the wrong idea, naivety no longer works as a defence. If OP is determined to tell herself she’s doing nothing wrong so she can continue the weekend/evening chats and ‘playful banter’ - ignoring the advice she’s had here, the warning from her friend, and the red flag of his wife reacting differently to her than she does to other female friends - it’s blindingly obvious she’s enjoying the attention and ego boost of knowing this man is interested in her. She’s risking her marriage as much as he’s risking his.

I've been the wife in this scenario. It started off with noticing her name frequently on his phone. Then I figured out he was calling her, sometimes 12× per day. Then I discovered he called her twice on Christmas day and when he was away in hotels for work, he would call her as soon as he woke up and right before bed. Just. As. Friends. Apparently.

The gaslighting was horrific. I was accused of being insane. I was called every name under the sun. Eventually, I'd had enough and reached out to the coworker. Like you, she didn't even respond. She didn't see me as a person. I was supposed to be the most important person in his life, but I wasn't even worth a text back from his "best friend."

I'm divorced now and I'm with a lovely new man. However, that was a very difficult time. You know exactly what you are doing and so does he. Emotional abuse comes in many forms and that's exactly what this is.

I didn't ever figure out whether it was physical, but in the end it didn't matter. It was disrespectful and not how I wanted to be treated. In the detective process I discovered evidence of physical cheating with others, so it was just the tip of the iceberg.

Op you say your husband is away working all weekend so you'll show him the messages on Monday. Does he work away a lot. Do you find yourself bored and alone at home a lot while he works different shifts to you?

She’s not showing him the messsages, let’s face it, unless she is a proper drama llama.

Yeah. Past a certain point, I don't really see how women can still get off on "I'm so sexy I threaten marriages". It's not like turning on a man, or getting attention from a man who's already got one eye out of his marriage is massively difficult. Women spend their lives trying to bat off attention they don't want and never tried to court. Of all the difficult things I've ever accomplished, making a man want sex could not be further from the list, and I look like I've been dug up.

That thread is so sad, his poor wife, bastards the pair of them

'Working away' hmm, wonder if the ops dh has a penchant for sending folk 'playful' messages too..

He hasn't said he doesn't want to be friends anymore. I wouldnt end a good friendship over someone's jealousy.

I for one can’t wait for Monday morning when OP is at work and her colleagues recognise that it’s her. I’d love to be a fly on the wall, but I’ll just have to imagine as we’ll never find out…unless one of her colleagues would like to update us!!!

This is the biggest pile-up I've ever seen on Mumsnet. I don't think there's a cat's chance of the OP coming back to update us about her cherished friendship, and my guess is that she's abandoned the thread after four pages of reading. I wonder sometimes, in the case of threads like this, where the (often hopelessly naive or attention-seeking) OP never comes back, but which have caught mine and others' interest, how much the OP actually takes on board what's been written and how things did pan out for them as a result.

Hmm, not sure that’s what’s being said, I’m not sure this is about thw wife’s jealousy and not about the ops inappropriate behaviour. He may well be getting concerned himself; he’d not be the first man to get his wife involved if some woman was not backing off, so he could preserve work place harmony.

the op is clearly chasing him and loving it. She’s got mentionitis. Her friend is right, she’s playing with fire. The calling him on a sat morning when her husband is away, buying him gifts, sending what’s clearly flirty messages, the hoping is marriage is in trouble etc is all going to cause her a lot of pain. She just doesn’t see it.

You should not put so much importance on another woman’s husband to make you smile… This is selfish and sounds romantic here.

He may well be getting concerned himself; he’d not be the first man to get his wife involved if some woman was not backing off, so he could preserve work place harmony.
That’s a good point, actually. At no point has OP said anything to suggest this colleague is actively seeking out contact with her.

She’s avoided directly answering multiple posters asking who usually messages first, but has said:
“He replies so I assume he’s happy to hear from me” and “If he didn’t want it to continue then he would stop replying”. If he’s only ever replying, this kind of implies that OP is usually (or always) sending the first message.

Then there’s the whole thing where they’d “been chatting about films over lunch” and she surprised him by searching for and buying him “a DVD of one of his favourite films”. No mention of him having bought thoughtful gifts for her, though.

It is strange that the colleague’s wife had OP’s number to call her, too. (In her attempts to paint the wife as unreasonable/insecure/“unfair”, surely OP would have mentioned if he’d told her she’d gone through his phone?)

This might be a little more one-sided than OP has presented it as being!

You and your awful colleague are emotionally abusing his wife. Shame on the pair of you.

Yes, these threads always bring out the nutsos who think any contact between people of the opposite sex means an affair is imminent.

I have bantery, funny conversations with male friends. I've even been known to buy male friends things <<flails about for smelling salts>>
I have a DP of 20+ years. Some of my male friends have long-term partners.
Our lives are, believe it or not, not a hotbed of repressed or imminent sexual impropriety.

You are almost as disingenuous as the OP.

I'm not being disingenuous.

Ok.

So you know that his wife is not happy about the two of you messaging each other outside work but you carry on regardless. Says a lot about the pair of you!

Bantery? The op said 'playful' which suggests desperate flirting.

It's hard to explain to these people who message married people constantly to boost their ego and keep messages secret from their dp but it isn't ok. We all have married friends, we all tend to socialise wirh the male and females rather than focus on the men.

It astounds me that apparently intelligent women can read an entire thread like this and reduce it down to something as simplistic as “nutsos” hysterically clutching their pearls and declaring that “men and women can’t be friends”.

There’s often a couple of people who hold that view, of course, but most of the replies are much more nuanced. Personally, I think ignoring the specifics/context of what’s been described and coming out with “well I have male friends and nothing has ever happened!”, as if this is some kind of universal rule that applies in every situation, is just as daft as the kind of replies you’re taking issue with.

You admit that the messages could be read as something to worry about. Would you like your husband to do this to you? Seems like you love the attention and you like winding the wife up. It’s all giving pick me vibes. Cringe and desperate.

We all have married friends, we all tend to socialise wirh the male and females rather than focus on the men.
That's funny; someone else is accusing me of applying my personal experience as if it's the correct/only experience and yet here you are using the term 'we all [do this that and the other]
If we are playing that way, I regret to inform you I have more than one married/committed-to-a-partner male friend where he and I are the friends and our respective other halves either don't know each other, or are on friendly acquaintance terms and see each other only occasionally at e.g. my or my DP's birthday.
Somehow we restrain ourselves from tearing each others' clothes off.