Being a working adult in a committed relationship demands accepting a strange reality: your partner sees the people at work just as much, or possibly more, than they see you out of the office.
That creates quite a polarized set up for each day.
The first half is spent with the people you had no ability to choose. The second half is spent with the person you chose above all others.
Talk about whiplash.
It's not so surprising that the daily post-work reuniting involves a back-and-forth barrage of blown off steam, centered around all those co-workers' inane nonsense. Each partner can finally unload under the cover of separate worlds.
Sometimes, though, the worlds collide.
This can go a few different ways. Usually, it is purely an awkward affair.
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Sometimes though, people do hit it off. But that's about as likely as Halley's Comet coming early.
There is also the occasional direct and slightly aggressive confrontation.
For one Redditor, choice three was the obvious one.
She begins her story by describing her assumption about how her husband's dynamics will jive at work.
"Almost everyone assumes that he is gay when they first meet him, unless I'm there to introduce myself as his wife."
She then elaborates on one coworker of her husband's, the catalyst of all of his versions of the previously-mentioned dishing.
"My husband has this straight female coworker, let's call her Sarah. My husband had never met up with her outside of work, and the few times he had mentioned her was mostly him complaining about her being too clingy and overbearing at work."
Back at base camp, however, our narrator had been interpreting a different dynamic, a problematic one for her.
"He described her acting in a way which, to me, sounded a lot like she had a crush on him."
Of course, it took a meeting of the minds to blow things wide open.
Enter the infamous "work party," an institution that will forever cause as many problems as it solves.
"At my husband's work party, me and a few others began chatting."
"The LGBT topic came up (can't remember how) and I mentioned that I was bisexual. To that, Sarah says "oh, I have a gay BFF, his name is [insert my husband's name]!"
"I asked if it was [husband's name] from [husband's workplace], and she said yes."
Our narrator had now isolated the target.
She wasted zero time becoming confrontational.
It's tempting to picture the set up of a rap battle when imaging the scenario she paints.
"I told her that clearly he didn't consider her to be his BFF, as otherwise she would've known that he is bisexual and married to a woman. She looked taken aback and asked me for proof about him being 1) bisexual and 2) married. I just pointed at my wedding ring."
"A few of the people with us (mostly me and my husband's mutual friends) burst out laughing, and Sarah looked extremely humiliated."
Evidently, the narrator's verbal take down sent the coworker spinning, forcing a withdrawal far away from her husband during work hours.
"Well, after that went down my husband never complained about Sarah being too clingy/overbearing again, so I guess something positive came out of it."
Our narrator is not a pure villain, however.
She ends the account by introducing some personal reflections.
"What made me snap was that I knew that this was the woman who had been making my husband's work days more stressful by being so clingy with him."
"But my intention was never to humiliate her in front of other people, and that makes me feel like I might be the a**hole."
Redditors were in no mood to blindly come to the narrator's aid.
"You didn't have to humiliate this woman. I know you said it wasn't your intention but the way you handled it makes me doubt that statement(especially the snarky pointing at your wedding ring)." -- bubuluc
"You can just say 'oh x is my husband, he's actually bi though, not gay,' which would have had the same effect but doesn't put her on the spot in a social situation." -- physioworld
"That's like high school mean girl behavior and you should be ashamed of yourself."
"You don't know what this woman is going through. Maybe she's lonely and doesn't have many friends and you've just blown up the only meaningful friendship she thought she had." -- starri_ski3
"The only thing I don't understand is why you're posting about this here. You seem pretty proud of yourself overall, and it doesn't sound like you're dealing with a negative reaction from anyone else in your real life."
"You're here because in your heart, you know you pulled a shi**y move. You don't need our judgment. You have your own to live with." -- mouse_attack
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"If the lady thought he was gay, that's why she was spending more time with him, not because she was attracted to him. She felt comfortable that their relationship was platonic because he was gay."
"Your husband should have been the one to lay boundaries in the relationship. You basically blindsided her with a metaphorical right hook to the jaw in front of everyone." -- Stinrawr
But plenty did agree with her that the "work friend" ought to be teed off on in public.
Most of the motivation behind these comments came from anger that the coworker assumed her husband's sexuality and tokenized him for it.
"She was totally out of line to assume his sexuality and then try to claim him as her token friend. Yuck." -- Appropriate-Energy
"She was stereotyping someone, being clingy and annoying, and demanding information about his life when someone told her differently." -- KyotoSkateShop
"If she's going to try to 'splain the orientation of another person to that person's own spouse, she deserves to have a spotlight shone on it." -- avast2006
"'Gay best friends' are such an odd manifestation of the fetishization of gay men."
"She decided your husband was her GBF and let it play exactly the way that goes: in her mind he became a sidekick to the drama of her own life with no need for her to create a fully realized image of who he is." -- thing_eli
Readers are left to wonder if the narrator breached the work-personal life separation another time on account of the feedback, this time with aims for goodwill.
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