I also remember actor Jude Law cheated on his extremely hot girlfriend Sienna Miller in 2006, with his somewhat chubby, and way less attractive children’s nanny, which ruined the couple"s marriage plans, and caused their breakup at the time.
Yeah, I don’t agree with the logic. I’m just put’n it out there as to why the OP mentioned the “Hotness” of his wife compared to chubby girl.
That said, I REALLY don’t believe the OP is the cause of his wife’s insecurities. I’ve been there. Trust me, there isn’t SHIT you can do to help people like this.
I don’t think he’s obviously headed toward an affair, exactly, but this situation has the hallmarks of how a lot of affairs start.
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None-too-happy marriage =/- devastating issue festering under the surface. Check.
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Unhappiness/devastating issue is 100% spouse’s fault. Check
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Just-a-friend-I-swear coworker who “gets” the OP in ways the spouse does not. Check.
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Spouse doesn’t know about JAFIS/is unaware of how much time they’re spending together. Check.
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JAFIS is also in a problematic relationship. Check.
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Slowly festering issue mentioned above is coming to a head. Check.
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OP is discussing at least one of the problematic relationships with JAFIS. Check.
I’m the least insecure wife on the planet. My husband has more female friends than I have, and he semi-regularly goes off to do stuff with them that neither I nor their husbands are interested in; I think it’s awesome that he has people to go do that kind of stuff with. But I’m also well aware that if things were different between us–if we weren’t happy, if he were hiding these friendships from me, if he and these women were sitting around discussing their unhappy relationships with each other–that these relationships could be prime breeding grounds for an affair. It happens. It happens so often it’s a cliche, and in point of fact one of my uncles and one of my friends are each marrying their JAFIS in the next couple weeks.
It’s “obvious” because it sounds like the OP is saying “my hot, crazy-jealous posessive wife with diagnosed mental problems is all up in my grill because I’m friends with this petite little girl at work whose all into the same shit I’m into.”
And that, in my observations, frequently turns into a series of IMHO threads with titles like:
“Does this girl at work like me like that?”
“Is it weird we always end up hanging out by ourselves after the office happy hours?”
“Is it cheating that I spend so much time hanging out with this girl?”
“Do blowjobs count as cheating?”
“How do I find a good divorce lawyer?”
Now I don’t have a crystal ball. But it just seems to me that a PITA wife, a guy with poor impulse control and a girl who seems to be a “female version of him” is a recipe for cheating.
Maybe you guys can all get together and do something that combines your love of drama with your love of beating cops? Like throw meth parties or something?
As do I. However I’m not so niave as to believe my SO is not going to raise an eyebrow if a female friend is maybe a bit too affectionate, especially after a couple of drinks. It’s not as if she doesn’t trust me. It’s disrespectful to her for a woman to obviously flirt with me right in front of her. And eventially she will be justified in being angry with me if I don’t put a stop to it.
Or rather, the OP:
married somebody with whom he apparently shares no common interests and has nothing in common to do or talk about (both since he doesn’t mention it and explains how understood he feels with Girlfriend from work). The OP doesn’t mention trying to develop common ground with his wife, so he doesn’t want the marriage to work as partnership.
claims his wife is insecure and claims she is mentally ill, but doesn’t mention anything he did to help her overcome her insecurity to become a strong person and a real partner. If she really were mentally ill, she would need counselling and a partner to help her, not look around. The OP doesn’t mention that either.
Moreover, men who tell wifes that they are dumb, hysterical etc. is an extremly common tactic for controlling women, making them insecure and keep them from calling out the bad behaviour of the men.
The OP claims he’s the perfect husband, which means he has delusions about himself and can’t accept criticism. (May be connected with the wife’s insecurity), based only on acquiescing to the demands of the wife. Nothing about working together with her to get new hobbies, find friends of her own (or common friends) and learn self-worth.
So we hear one side from an unreliable biased source heading in a bad direction.
That post made me go: “aha!” and smile in recognition. I am saving this quote for future use in threads on “how important is physical beauty in women in the dating game”.
hijacking, but to address the issue of the relative beauty of different women and it’s importance to men:
One subset of men I was once among was sailors and Marines. You may remember the River Phoenix movie Dogfight, which had as its theme the, uh, frisson men experience between their desire for women and their harsh evaluations of them. The sailors and Marines I knew, who were mainly having sex with prostitutes, were proud of the lowness of their standards. The reasoning being that a real man should have the raging testosterone levels enabling him to fuck the ugliest woman on earth. If you can only become aroused with pretty girls you must be some kind of queer. (It has its own logic.)
But as far as having a girlfriend: in that case physical beauty was highly prized. You wouldn’t be seeing her very often anyway, so sex wasn’t an issue. She’d only exist as a photo that the other sailors and Marines could envy. *“Man, I’d eat a mile of her shit just to see where it’s coming from!” *But again, beauty meant nothing: the pretty girlfriends either dump you or get fat and pregnant. Beauty is just a con game that rich civillians have can play.
Bottom line: attractiveness is nice, but availability is what counts.
Of course, it’s a one-sided, biased account. Most conversations are, including the ones I have off-line. So either we insist on hearing from all parties before doling out advice, or we simply react based on the (limited and one-sided) information we’re given.
I’m going with the latter. You want to speculate and fill in the rest of the story using your fertile imagination, go right ahead.
I’m feeling a bit of a need for our OP to weigh in on some of these more recent comments, is anybody else?
That would be nice.
Yeah, although I’m not holding much hope, I don’t think the conversation went quite the way he expected/wanted…
IMHO a lot of Marines try too hard to show how gay they aren’t.
I have known at least two women who weren’t particulary hot, and had the reputaion of being a bit shy and not particulary into sex who had virtually every male in sight slavering over them because they knew how to press the right buttons.
Subtly massaging mens ego’s, with" poorly" concealed admiration, flattery, sympathising with them when they had difficulties, and even laughing at their jokes, all worked to make hardened grown ups oblivious to the fact that they were being “hauled in”.
It could well be that this is what is happening to the o.p., or could be as the “friend” appears to love a violent man, perhaps she gets a thrill out of causing a situation between her man and other men, as some women do.
I think that the o.p. is not as streetwise as he thinks he is.
But of course I could be wrong, and the friend is a pure as the driven snow and is unaware of the results of their mutual actions.
The OP will wind up divorced within 3 years no matter what.
Hot, crazy, no shared interests is a bucket of fail. Dangerous fail.
I advise him to immediately seek representation. A divorce may be expensive now, but it’ll get more expensive later.
I suggest that he not convert his co-worker into a lover, BECAUSE HE WORKS WITH HER.
Once divorced, he should start looking for a chick that gets him. Don’t settle.
I have one of those now, and I am happier right now than I have been since about 1992.
SWITCHING MODES:
If you are going to ignore us and stay married to your current wife, stop talking to your new friend outside of the interaction required to do your job. 99.9% chance that you’ll wind up upsetting your wife such that you’ll hurt her, badly. You can’t reason with crazy.
By continuing to talk to your new friend, you are also running a small risk that either yourself or her will be injured or killed by her partner.
But we only have his word that she’s crazy.
I wonder how many women have heard variations on the line of "My wife doesn’t understand me " .
This is true. A friend of mine told me he had a divorce because his last wife was crazy and controlling. I’m like “well…were you getting drunk every night and banging waitresses on the side like you do with your current wife? Because I can sort of see how she might take issue with that.”
Question from clueless female who usually fits in as ‘one of the guys’:
The OP references a new friend, what happens with an old friend you’ve had forever? I have an old school friend who I knew for years before he got his current girlfriend, but now he’s dropped off the face of the earth. I mean, I’ve known him for years, why would new girlfriend suddenly freak out? If I wanted to date him, I would have when we were both single. If I was one of those girls who like attached men, I would have gone for him when he had his last girlfriend. I am about as threatening to your relationship as a dead goldfish.
Is anybody else surprised that this guy takes shit from anybody? Just tell her she got some fuckin’ attitude. And then get her skull.
People are funny that way. I’ve had a close male friend for essentially my entire adult life, and he was single for years during that time. Nothing ever happened to the slightest degree, but one of his girlfriends absolutely insisted that we were having an affair. Never mind we’d lived together as roommates multiple times with zero affection of ANY kind occurring and zero consideration of a relationship ever occurring, the fact that we spent time together without her meant that we were having an affair now.
For reference, I am not at all the kind of girl that other girls are jealous of. I’m bookish and nerdy, I’m overweight, I’m not particularly feminine-dressing. None of that mattered. She literally believed that men and women could never be platonic friends; platonic relationships could only exist within your gender, and the only reason to socialize with the opposite sex was for the purposes of sex or relationships. No amount of discussion would move her; no amount of group social time including her helped. I’d babysit her kid so they could go out on date nights and things, I tried to take interest in her as a person. Nope, still a threat.
In the end she ordered my friend to not spend time with me anymore. Fortunately, he refused, but it was a source of much contention. In the end, to try to save the relationship, he did start to lie (mostly by omission) about seeing me at all, which was very uncomfortable for me. I didn’t really approve of it but he thought he could fix her insecurity issues. In the end he could not.
I’m sure a lot of people do lie to themselves about an infatuation with a friend, but there really, really are platonic relationships out there. Calling it ‘emotional cheating’ and stuff like that is pretty bullshit too. Just because you have a SO doesn’t mean you can’t have friends that you talk with about things that are important to you, so long as it’s not to the exclusion of maintaining your relationship.