Recently, my boyfriend and I (been together 3 years) moved to another state, as we wanted a fresh start. We have a new apartment, we are in a town we have never lived in before, and we are both working new jobs. Everything has been going really well for us lately.
Except, I’m starting to run into one little problem that I want to solve before it becomes a bigger issue.
My boyfriend started a new job two weeks ago. He works outside, installing well pumps at houses. He is being trained by a female coworker who is a few years older than him, and they work alone, together, all day long. For context here, she also has a fiancé.
I didn’t see any problem with this at first. I didn’t even think twice about it. I was hoping to actually meet this woman and become friends with her, as I’m looking to make new friends in this new town. However, everyday when my boyfriend comes home from work, he’s been telling me things that are starting to make me uncomfortable.
It started out with her making backhanded comments about my job. I work as a teacher, and right now, it’s summer vacation, so I’m on break. She asked what I do for work, and he replied that I’m a teacher, so I’m off of work right now. She replied with a snarky comment, “Oh… must be nice.” To that, he just replied, “Yeah.” He is a little socially awkward, and has a hard time standing up for himself AND me.
Then came some strange comments from her, like telling my boyfriend, “Wow, you’re actually a lot stronger than you look.” And proceeding to tell him that her only requirement in a man is that he is stronger than her… I wouldn’t have thought it was that weird until she added the part about her requirements in a man.
She makes lots of comments about his strength, his facial hair, his appearance…. but never anything about his work. Never anything useful. She’s supposed to be training him, and she seems to be placing more focus on his appearance than his quality of work. He told me she has not said one word about whether or not he is completing tasks correctly or not. He feels like she’s provided very little actual guidance.
Yesterday, she asked him if I know how to operate an excavator. This is not a task I’ve ever needed to do in my life, but apparently, she thought that it made her “better” than me that she could operate an excavator. This one was funny to me, as I would never judge ANYBODY for not being able to perform such an oddly specific task. Judging your coworker’s girlfriend on her ability to operate an excavator…. I laughed for almost an hour about this yesterday. It’s bizarre to me.
She asks him a bunch of questions about me, and not just those questions you ask a coworker to learn more about them and their family. It’s weird, personal questions. “Does your girlfriend get mad when you do (insert an action here)?”
I also bake, A LOT. Every single one of our meals is a home cooked meal, and I put so much time and effort into it all. After my boyfriend told his coworker this, she proceeded to go on this long tangent about how she refuses to let her fiancé eat store bought bread and how she will bake my boyfriend some homemade bread. She made it sound like I am somehow neglecting my boyfriend by feeding him…. STORE BOUGHT BREAD. 😱
My boyfriend has only made one comment about her that really rubbed me the wrong way. He’s got two other coworkers, both men, that he works with, but not nearly as often. Randomly one day, he made a comment out of nowhere about how his female coworker is really the only person from his work that he would hang out with outside of work. This bothered me because, in the past, we’ve talked about not hanging out with opposite sex coworkers alone outside of work, it’s just a rule that I thought we BOTH had. Apparently, that’s changed.
I can’t tell him not to talk to her, because, she’s training him. It didn’t make me uncomfortable at first, but I’m unsure of her intentions here. I told my boyfriend yesterday that I’m a little bit concerned about how this coworker is talking about me. Mind you, she’s never met me before. It’s very strange for her to even think this much about me. I am not sure what to tell my boyfriend here, but I do not appreciate being disrespected in this way.
Every day he comes home and tells me something that his coworker said, and it upsets me. I don’t know why this woman has a problem with me… we’ve never met before. My boyfriend is younger than her, he has a girlfriend, and this woman has a fiancé. I’m thinking that maybe she gets some kind of ego boost from it, but I’m not sure.
What can I do here? I don’t want to be overbearing or controlling, but I don’t want to tolerate this kind of disrespect forever. I feel as though he should stick up for me when she says things like this, but he always tells me that he didn’t see anything wrong with it at the time. He “only realizes how wrong it is” after I’ve said something to him.
TL;DR: My boyfriend has recently started a new job, and his female coworker who is training him is making me uncomfortable. She makes strange comments about him, and makes judgements about me without knowing me.