In relationships, it can sometimes be hard to find the balance between listening to the concerns our partners have and trying to come to their rescue. We often share our stresses or concerns more to have a sounding board and not necessarily because we're looking for advice or for someone to tell us what to do. And when that happens, it sometimes results in a lot of tension or stress in the relationship — on top of whatever’s already causing the issue.
For example, one husband took to Reddit with a similar issue. The original poster's wife had something happen, she turned to him for support, and now he’s demanding that she take his advice.
And, as predicted, OP and his wife are now fighting, and he’s not sure where he went wrong.
To try to figure out why his wife is so mad, OP shared some details in Reddit’s AITA community looking for advice.
“My wife and I have been married 5 years, no kids,” he shared. “We both work in different professional fields. She has always been more career-minded and ambitious than me but it's never presented a problem until now.”
Recently, his wife had a work dinner with her boss and some clients, and it took a strange turn.
“She came home late, around 8PM, and sat me down and told me she needed to tell me something,” OP explained.
We all know when someone says something like that, it’s probably not good. And that held true in this story. “Her boss had had a few drinks and after the clients had left he started telling my wife how great she looked.”
But it didn’t stop at that.
OP explained that his wife’s boss continued to talk in appropriately. Saying “how they should get together and her husband would never have to know, and then asked her if he could kiss her,” OP explained.
“My wife said it was awkward but she laughed it off and got him an Uber to go home.”
When his wife told him about what happened, he was angry.
“I was pretty livid about this,” he admitted, but went on to tell his wife what he thought she should do. “I told my wife she needs to report this to HR and ask that they take action by firing him or at minimum removing him from her reporting structure.”
But that’s not the course of action that his wife wants to take. “My wife wants to do nothing, she thinks her boss just got a little drunk and she doesn't want to upset her career trajectory,” OP shared.
“I told her I think that's flat-out unacceptable, this is her boss and her remaining under his authority shouldn't even be a possibility.”
OP tried to understand his wife’s position. So he asked what she would do if it was the other way around.
“My wife is adamant that pretending this didn't happen and being more cautious about being alone with him at drinking events is all that's needed,” he wrote. “I asked her what she'd want me to do if someone in my team started coming on to me and she said she'd want me to switch teams,” OP added, “but it's different because I don't care about my career as much as her and my role is less specialized and easier to transfer.”
OP was upset about that too, writing, “Needless to say this upset me more because it seems like she's humiliating my job on top of our marriage.”
And that’s when he asked the Reddit community to weigh in, asking if he was in the wrong “for not being on board with how my wife wants to handle this?”
“A woman's career can and does absolutely get affected by reporting harassment,” one redditor replied. “It's not right, and it's not ok, but it's the truth. OP, your wife made a calculated decision. I promise she didn't do it lightly. Women have to make nasty decisions like this all the time. If you want to be mad, be mad at the patriarchy that women have learned to barely survive under.”
The advice continued.
“You're not seeing it with the lifetime conditioning lens of a woman,” another person explained. “This COULD ruin her career. It could brand her as 'difficult to work with.' It could terminate her position at her job. And maybe other women would be grateful, maybe her boss would get counseled…but she'd still be carrying her desk in a box out the door."
Adding, "But it IS wrong. And you're not invalid for being upset and outraged. But the thing is, this happened to her. Not to you. She is not an extension of you. Which means your role here is to support her being the protagonist, trust her decision-making skills, and act as a sidekick, not the guy directing her what to do or doing it behind her back.”
Reddit was fairly unanimous in how it felt OP handled the situation with his wife.
“In a perfect world, yeah, she'd be able to go to HR and her boss would get fired,” someone else wrote. “However, we do not live in a perfect world. It's really petty of you to be insecure about what she said about your own job when you're forgetting the actual issue here: your wife was sexually harassed by her boss. That's a painful, emotional, awful thing to experience. You should be trying to help your wife feel better instead of telling her she's handling it wrong and not being nice enough to you about it in the process.”
Reddit was more or less unanimous that OP needs to back off pressuring his wife to handle this in a different way. And, as many suggested, it's probably good for him to read up on what the workplace is like for women.
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
