There’s a “work wife,” and then there’s “I’m-going-to-physically-shove-your-actual-wife-out-of-her-chair.” This, my friends, is a story about the second kind, and a husband who is so dense, he’s bringing a spoon to a knife fight he doesn’t even know he’s in.
Our narrator, a 37-year-old woman, is married to a 40-year-old man who is apparently the most desirable Maintenance Supervisor on planet earth. About a year ago, a woman named “Tabitha” started in the accounting department, and she has, in the narrator’s words, an “infatuation” with her husband.
This isn’t just a “crush.” This is a full-on, single-white-female campaign. It started with her office. The heat went out. The husband, as supervisor, is supposed to assign tasks to his employees. But Tabitha, our villain, is “never satisfied” with their work. Oh no. She “demands” that the supervisor come and fix her office. She calls him for “mundane” things, like a loose coat hook. And he just… does it.
This is all annoying, but then comes the Christmas party. The narrator and her husband are there, and Tabitha makes her move. She is “very flirty,” “constantly grabbing his hand.” When the husband tries to introduce his actual wife, Tabitha just… ignores her. She grins, says “look there’s Peter,” grabs his hand, and walks away.
But oh, we are not done. When they all sit down, Tabitha “d*mn near pushed me out of my seat to sit next to him.” The husband, to his one ounce of credit, told her to get up. But Tabitha, now in a “huff,” found the wife in the restroom later and shoved past her.
The wife, like any sane person, tells her husband what happened. And his response? “He said it was fine, that she was harmless.”
I’m sorry. Harmless? Sir, your coworker just physically assaulted your wife in a bathroom after trying to steal her chair and her husband. “Harmless” is not the word. “Unhinged” is the word. “Predatory” is the word.
This is where the story goes from “your husband is a walnut” to “your husband is actively betraying you.” The harassment has “ramped up to an astonishing level.” He helped her move into her new house. And then, the final nail in the coffin: he gave her his personal cell phone number.
The narrator is now living in a nightmare. Tabitha calls and texts “non-stop,” at “all hours of the day and night.” And last night? The call came at 2:00 AM. Her heat wasn’t working. And this man, this absolute trophy of a husband, told his wife he would “go over and look at it after work.”
This was the final straw. The wife, a saint, a queen, a woman who has tolerated so much, finally “broke down.” She told him he was not going. She told him Tabitha could “call a technician like everyone else.”
She laid it all out for him: “she has feelings for him and he is so dense he can’t see it,” “she calls him all the time for things she can do on her own,” and “once he gave out his personal phone number… he crossed a line.”
And his defense? He still thinks he’s “just wanting to help a friend” and that it’s an “easy fix.” So she gave him the ultimatum he deserved: “he can either to be married to me, or married to her, but I wasn’t going to be the third wheel in my own marriage.”
And this man still thinks she is “overreacting.”
So, is she the ahole? Let me be as clear as humanly possible: N-T-A. You are not the ahole. You are not “overreacting.” You are reacting perfectly. Your husband’s “kindness” is so profound that it has circled all the way back around to “deeply inappropriate emotional affair.” He’s not “helping a friend”; he’s auditioning to be her next husband.