Major Problem @Work…Please Help
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He’s calculating and intentional in what he does and how he shares He is a mirror curtsy of your own ambitious aims, you each having fully inspected all the careful, layered, valentine-coated details, as innocuously as a lad in February morning reception and with his matching mischievous manner.
Introverted familiarity and opportunity have encouraged him into Exposure. Why overly-familiar? Because it makes you nervous.
And while you are enjoying having the boss confide in you and you sense some vulnerability on his end, I think you are aware it will never go too far. The only problem is that your stern want for control while also basking in butterfly sensations feels problematic.I concur with anonymousse. Its high time to replace overthinking with under-thinking by vacating to some place balmy and to let down your hair. Have some other lad of fifty curl your toes and shock your lips dizzy. The energy will shift, and you won’t care so much about his motives once the thrill is satisfied.
Tell him next time he inquiries about your safety, you appreciate the concern, but he doesn’t need to worry about it. If you are correct and he is thinking about you as much as you secretly hope, he’ll take it down a notch. My guess is there is no master strategy in his head. He hasn’t given you a reason to believe that, he just has known you a long time and maybe needs to work some shit out in his personal life and he’s using the letter writer as his own side story/support.
I agree that if a coworker commented that your boss always sits next to you, you are already the topic of office gossip. And that’s going to affect you the most.
You need to shut this down by not encouraging it. Stop staring. Go on a vacation and clear your head. You’re getting dangerously close to screwing your own career.
@BGM, you’re not a straight woman though? The dynamic is a little different there with a straight man laying that crap on a straight woman, than like two same sex friends or a straight woman / gay man.
@BGM and @Kate -it really is. In 25 years I can recall only two times that men have shocked me when speaking about their spouses. One was a guy whose wife had simply lost her marbles and he was telling me the whole mess because he was on the verge of losing his damn mind.
The other was a dickhead who ran his own business and had his wife write contracts. She was a therapist with no contract writing background or skills and he would complain about the quality of the contracts. As someone whose dad/stepmother worked together, I was aghast that this guy would speak ill about his wife to his underlings. He was also an immature baby-man who threw temper tantrums.
I had a boss once who told me that he thought he and his wife might get a divorce, but he didn’t go into any more detail than that. He seemed very aware that if he said more about it, it would be unprofessional and unfair to his wife. I also had a co-worker who talked about how he’d been with his girlfriend for 6 years and sometimes wondered if it was the best fit, but he chose his words very carefully to sound diplomatic. That’s the closest I’ve come to people gossiping about their spouses in this way, and both seemed very clear that there was a boundary and they were not going to cross it.
What a read!
I agree that the update sounds like a total script flip. The original post frames this guy as entirely professional and friendly, and the update shows him to be the complete opposite. You go from total infatuation to saying this guy is a creep that makes you feel uncomfortable and literally yells at you about your personal decisions.
So here’s what you do:
1) Don’t share personal information about yourself with him.
2) Shut him down if he starts talking about marital problems.
3) Only interact with him as professionally necessary.This guy sounds like the type to fly off the handle (when it’s just the two of you alone) when you refuse to engage with him on topics that ~*actually are not*~ professional, so try to avoid being alone with him. Yes, people talk about their spouses at work (I’m a straight female, for the record, so my experience has been different than Kate’s), but they don’t go into detail about how incompatible they are with them, and basically bad-mouth them. That is a *major* red flag and I completely agree re:grooming you for an affair.
Unrelated, but, in reference to his “wild, inappropriate” kids: “his wife insisted on raising them the complete opposite of what he thought was *right*” – well assuming he works 70 hours a week or more, then he’s probably deferred most parenting responsibilities to her and he’s forfeited much of his right to complain along with it. We’re a few generations past men getting to dictate to their wives.
Eh, I don’t buy it. She is covering her butt to make herself look better, which sadly just made her look far worse.
Or, we are approaching the end of the college term and somebody has a term paper due and we are the research material. Could be a troll as well, but way too big a change in info to be real.
You’ve done all this in-depth analysis of how he behaves toward you and the sexual tension and all of it misses the point – Even if he does love you and lust after you, it doesn’t matter. Feelings don’t require you to act on them. They don’t even require you to talk about them. They only have the importance that you give them (or that he gives them).
I mean, let’s assume that he is in love with you. That over the years, he’s developed a deep attraction to you and feelings for you, and sometimes he even has a fantasy about what it would be like to act on them. Even if all of that’s true, if he’s not a giant asshole, he just lets those feelings exist and the only action he takes on them is take the energy from that tension back home to his wife.
Likewise, even if you’re in love with him, that doesn’t have to be an important, defining thing for you. You can just have those feelings, and not act on them. Instead, you can do things that don’t cause a bunch of problems for you, like finding other people to direct all that energy toward. You have that power even if he did prove himself an asshole by making a move.
Feelings can feel so huge and all-consuming, but they don’t have to be if you decide not to feed them.He is what, 20+ years into a marriage. Again, he is picking up on your long term obsession with him. He is grooming you for an affair. Not because he is in love with you, hell, he may not even like you – he surely doesn’t respect you. He is in a position of power over you at work, and is trying to leech that power into your personal life – see your comments about the maid service and his concern for your safety along with his “checking” on you emails.
His sudden sharing of personal woes – his wife does not understand him; his kids are out of control; he is horrible shy and struggles daily…. just BS.
He sees your (misplaced; continued; long term; out of control) attraction and figures you are ripe for the picking. He is encouraging it with the long looks and sitting near you crap.
All of this is also designed to fluster you.
He knows that co-workers are already gossiping about the two of you and he is more than willing to fan that flame. The only one to get burned here is you. He holds a position of power in your organization….folk may talk about him, but they will vilify you.
This man is not your friend. Cut off the personal talk. Ignore the personal emails. Avoid him unless you absolutely have to talk work stuff with him.
