Dh texts/calls female coworkers regularly

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Ok, let me start off by saying I’m pregnant and I know how hormones can make things seem overwhelming.

My husband has had a problem with being too friendly in the workplace towards females and will love to get his ego stroked when he saves the day, provides unsolicited mentoring, and overly friendly towards women.

End of last year, I caught him deleting messages to female coworker that were too friendly on his part. We had a big blowout and he promised he wouldn’t text or call her on his cell phone and any questions would be through work phone. He also said he would stop constantly texting and calling 2 other female coworkers.

I recently came across more messages and phonecalls to her. A lot of messages were in his spam box so that I wouldn’t see them in his regular text messages. He also sent her a picture of how nice his new office was. He also has continued to text and call the 2 other female coworkers and has added another “friend” to his texting. Iniitially, he said he didn’t do anything wrong and gave me a million exuses as to his behavior. Now he’s at the point where he’s promising me the moon and the stars.

I am not going to deal with this a second time and feel I cannot trust him or what he says. Are my pregnancy hormones taking over and I’m overreacting? or is this something that our marriage will have to deal with again?
 
jmj777 said:
Ok, let me start off by saying I’m pregnant and I know how hormones can make things seem overwhelming.

My husband has had a problem with being too friendly in the workplace towards females and will love to get his ego stroked when he saves the day, provides unsolicited mentoring, and overly friendly towards women.

End of last year, I caught him deleting messages to female coworker that were too friendly on his part. We had a big blowout and he promised he wouldn’t text or call her on his cell phone and any questions would be through work phone. He also said he would stop constantly texting and calling 2 other female coworkers.

I recently came across more messages and phonecalls to her. A lot of messages were in his spam box so that I wouldn’t see them in his regular text messages. He also sent her a picture of how nice his new office was. He also has continued to text and call the 2 other female coworkers and has added another “friend” to his texting. Iniitially, he said he didn’t do anything wrong and gave me a million exuses as to his behavior. Now he’s at the point where he’s promising me the moon and the stars.

I am not going to deal with this a second time and feel I cannot trust him or what he says. Are my pregnancy hormones taking over and I’m overreacting? or is this something that our marriage will have to deal with again?
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No, you’re not overreacting.

He’s emotionally investing in these people, when he should be emotionally investing in his family. He can work when he’s at work (and maybe send necessary work texts or emails when he’s home), but he shouldn’t be “constantly texting” these people that he already spends 40 hours a week with.

And, aside from the offense to you, he is creating a situation where he may potentially be seen as unprofessional or harassing. Without meaning to, he may be turning into the office creep. And there’s a HUGE digital trail at this point. He better hope to goodness that none of these women is annoyed or offended by his behavior.
 
I think you’re going to have to deal with it all over again. 😦 :console:
 
Because of your pregnancy, your husband may have promised to do more than he actually intended to. But, the fact remains, he lied to you. You should probably spelak to a therapist or marriage counselor about this. Then, without fighting, you both can decide just how far he should go in texting, and how he will contact the women he has to contact for work issues.

I truly wish you the best. Your baby should be welcomed into a Loving, trusting home, by both parents. Both of you…work on making this happen.
 
Tell him you understand he needs friends, but in light of how things swerve in a not-so-great way, encourage him to cultivate other friendships.

It isn’t just that he’s likely to stray with respect to your marriage, either. He really cannot afford to make friendships at work that he has to cool off and maybe expose himself to sexual harassment complaints. Friendships at work with members of the opposite sex are great until they aren’t. When they go south, they have this way of going farther south for the guys. Besides, if his friends at work have this way of always being female, there are dynamics going on there that could really come back to bite him. That would be true even if he were single, but he is a husband and soon to be a father. That is a whole stack of reasons to keep it professional with the women he works with. (I suspect that if he looks around, he’ll realize that this is what most of the other guys he works with do?)
 
Hiding it from his wife and lying to his wife are definitely red flags. That being said, having personal friendships with female coworkers is not inherently wrong. Three of my closest women friends were at one point or another also co-workers…and they also happen to be friends with my wife. Daily texting doesn’t enter into it - but perhaps once every few days.

Other than the frequency, was there anything romantic in the messages he’s been hiding? Some people are by nature “overly friendly” with both sexes.
 
My feeling is:
If it bothers you , he needs to stop it.
And as Xanti says, his boss may officially stop it for him.
I’m sorry this is happening to you.

As they say in the southwest, no bueno.
As they say in the south…he needs a “Come to Jesus” talk.
If he’s hurriedly deleting things, he realizes how bad it is.
 
I don’t know how old your husband is but it sounds like he needs to grow up. Playing emotional grab-a*s with co-workers is 100% wrong for a married man with a pregnant wife.

This is sooooo common these days with young husbands. There’s a post almost everyday like this one…‘My DH acts like a teenager at a high school football game on Friday night.’

My advice, as an almost formerly immature husband, is to go at him hard. Let your pregnancy hormones guide you. 😛 Throw his phone in the toilet if you need to. Boys need strong discipline, tell him to straighten up or leave. You will not have to live with this sort of behavior for the rest of your life. Not to mention the example he could be setting for your children.
 
1Lord1Faith said:
I don’t know how old your husband is but it sounds like he needs to grow up. Playing emotional grab-a*s with co-workers is 100% wrong for a married man with a pregnant wife.

This is sooooo common these days with young husbands. There’s a post almost everyday like this one…‘My DH acts like a teenager at a high school football game on Friday night.’

My advice, as an almost formerly immature husband, is to go at him hard. Let your pregnancy hormones guide you. 😛 Throw his phone in the toilet if you need to. Boys need strong discipline, tell him to straighten up or leave. You will not have to live with this sort of behavior for the rest of your life. Not to mention the example he could be setting for your children.
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Bravo !!:clapping::love:
 
My take on the cell phone is that it is not always just communication tool but a new way for one to boost their ego by being constantly sought after for all kinds of trivia. It’s also highly addictive and that is a bad sign.

It also bothers me that for marrieds the cell phone can create many opportunities for spouses to communicate with others outside the realm of their marriage or necessary business doings. Single people enjoy this type of freedom that perhaps marrieds should not participate in. He should not be giving his cell to other women.

I am sure your husband has an answering service at work. The coworkers should use that for business. If they need to reach him out of the office for emergencies only, home phone is best and make sure they know it is your home phone. Change his cell number and set new rules .

I would like to here how other business people, especially men, handle this delicate issue. Do they freely hand out their private cell numbers to coworkers? Do they use the office answering service?
 
As_for_my_House said:
My take on the cell phone is that it is not always just communication tool but a new way for one to boost their ego by being constantly sought after for all kinds of trivia. It’s also highly addictive and that is a bad sign.

It also bothers me that for marrieds the cell phone can create many opportunities for spouses to communicate with others outside the realm of their marriage or necessary business doings. Single people enjoy this type of freedom that perhaps marrieds should not participate in. He should not be giving his cell to other women.

I am sure your husband has an answering service at work. The coworkers should use that for business. If they need to reach him out of the office for emergencies only, home phone is best and make sure they know it is your home phone. Change his cell number and set new rules .

I would like to here how other business people, especially men, handle this delicate issue. Do they freely hand out their private cell numbers to coworkers? Do they use the office answering service?
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In my experience, email using official email addresses (not private ones) is the usual way for business to get done at my husband’s workplace. He has maybe one male colleague that he texts with, but that’s probably 50% business/50% fun, and these aren’t long exchanges.
 
Xantippe said:
In my experience, email using official email addresses (not private ones) is the usual way for business to get done at my husband’s workplace. He has maybe one male colleague that he texts with, but that’s probably 50% business/50% fun, and these aren’t long exchanges.
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This is true for my husband’s work too, although he does have a work issued phone for emergencies (which do occur occasionally.) He gets on well at work with just about everyone, but never uses the phone for purely personal communication with coworkers.

I do think he’s glued to screens too much, but that’s sports and blogging. That annoys me, but it’s very different from chatting with other women.
 
pensmama87 said:
This is true for my husband’s work too, although he does have a work issued phone for emergencies (which do occur occasionally.) He gets on well at work with just about everyone, but never uses the phone for purely personal communication with coworkers.

I do think he’s glued to screens too much, but that’s sports and blogging. That annoys me, but it’s very different from chatting with other women.
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Yeah. I can imagine that there are fast-moving workplaces where cell phones are very important, but a lot of workplaces just aren’t.
 
As_for_my_House said:
My take on the cell phone is that it is not always just communication tool but a new way for one to boost their ego by being constantly sought after for all kinds of trivia. It’s also highly addictive and that is a bad sign.

It also bothers me that for marrieds the cell phone can create many opportunities for spouses to communicate with others outside the realm of their marriage or necessary business doings. Single people enjoy this type of freedom that perhaps marrieds should not participate in. He should not be giving his cell to other women.

I am sure your husband has an answering service at work. The coworkers should use that for business. If they need to reach him out of the office for emergencies only, home phone is best and make sure they know it is your home phone. Change his cell number and set new rules .

I would like to here how other business people, especially men, handle this delicate issue. Do they freely hand out their private cell numbers to coworkers? Do they use the office answering service?
Click to expand...
Do people still have home phones? We certainly don’t. My parents don’t. I can’t think of any of my friends (30ish age range) who do. Everyone has cell phones and no need for anything else. This makes sense pragmatically but can cause issues in this sort of situation.
To answer your question - I only have the one iPhone. I use it for both personal and professional purposes 24/7. I receive work calls / texts / emails and I receive personal calls / texts / emails. In my experience this is fairly common today. That same # is listed on my business cards and given out to friends and family. My personal and work emails are different, but as you can set up multiple mailboxes on a single phone, it would just be a major pain to carry around multiple devices.
 
twf said:
Do people still have home phones? We certainly don’t. My parents don’t. I can’t think of any of my friends (30ish age range) who do. Everyone has cell phones and no need for anything else. This makes sense pragmatically but can cause issues in this sort of situation.
To answer your question - I only have the one iPhone. I use it for both personal and professional purposes 24/7. I receive work calls / texts / emails and I receive personal calls / texts / emails. In my experience this is fairly common today. That same # is listed on my business cards and given out to friends and family. My personal and work emails are different, but as you can set up multiple mailboxes on a single phone, it would just be a major pain to carry around multiple devices.
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Yep.

Plus, carrying around multiple phones is shady, too.

puretalkusa.com/blog/what-is-a-burner-phone/
 
You are not being unreasonable.

There’s a philosophical question that routinely comes up in the Navy during beer/drink and cigar sessions.

“Is xxxx physical act being unfaithful?”

The answer, after debate back and forth on intentions, level of intimacy, emotional detachment is invariably:

Anything you do that you know your spouse doesn’t want you doing is being unfaithful.

It’s an individual’s responsibility to clear up issues about acceptable conduct before engaging in them. If your husband truly thinks you’re being unreasonable -then he should defend his actions and work with you to come up with an acceptable compromise. If he jas agreed to particular conduct- then he needs to abide by it. Anything else is an abuse of your trust and damaging to the marriage. Just my .02
 
mommy_k said:
My dh has a phone that was given to him by his company, and has his personal phone…nothing shady here as his company pays for his work phone.

If you have 2 personal phones…then it’s different:shrug:
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Yep.
 
jmj777 said:
Ok, let me start off by saying I’m pregnant and I know how hormones can make things seem overwhelming.

My husband has had a problem with being too friendly in the workplace towards females and will love to get his ego stroked when he saves the day, provides unsolicited mentoring, and overly friendly towards women.

End of last year, I caught him deleting messages to female coworker that were too friendly on his part. We had a big blowout and he promised he wouldn’t text or call her on his cell phone and any questions would be through work phone. He also said he would stop constantly texting and calling 2 other female coworkers.

I recently came across more messages and phonecalls to her. A lot of messages were in his spam box so that I wouldn’t see them in his regular text messages. He also sent her a picture of how nice his new office was. He also has continued to text and call the 2 other female coworkers and has added another “friend” to his texting. Iniitially, he said he didn’t do anything wrong and gave me a million exuses as to his behavior. Now he’s at the point where he’s promising me the moon and the stars.

I am not going to deal with this a second time and feel I cannot trust him or what he says. Are my pregnancy hormones taking over and I’m overreacting? or is this something that our marriage will have to deal with again?
Click to expand...
Personally, I’d dig more and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Brower history can tell a lot.
 
twf said:
Do people still have home phones? We certainly don’t. My parents don’t. I can’t think of any of my friends (30ish age range) who do. Everyone has cell phones and no need for anything else. This makes sense pragmatically but can cause issues in this sort of situation.
To answer your question - I only have the one iPhone. I use it for both personal and professional purposes 24/7. I receive work calls / texts / emails and I receive personal calls / texts / emails. In my experience this is fairly common today. That same # is listed on my business cards and given out to friends and family. My personal and work emails are different, but as you can set up multiple mailboxes on a single phone, it would just be a major pain to carry around multiple devices.
Click to expand...
I still have a home phone but I can see that it is redundant for avid cell users. So are you married and if so how would you handle a social call or text from a female co-worker?
 
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