Ask a Manager: My Ex's Current Wife Applied For a Job on my Team

[minoanmiss]

3. My ex’s now-wife applied for a job on my small team

I was in a long-term relationship that ended several years ago. Generally, we were not good for each other in the romantic sense, and things ended on a not-so-great note. Fast forward to today: I am now happily married with a baby on the way. He is also married, though I have not spoken to him, nor do I know his partner in any way. He met her toward the end of our relationship, and there is a possibility that he emotionally cheated on me with her. Again, I have moved on and do not care.

I started a new job in the last six months in a small department. I recently found out from my coworker that my ex’s wife has applied for an open position in our department. The position is not located in the same building as mine, so interaction would be limited to team meetings that happen maybe once a month.

Being so new, I want to be as professional as I can be (especially now that I will be leaving for maternity leave before my first year anniversary with the company). I can easily put the past behind me and be polite and professional with this person. I am unsure of how she would react though, and this situation has potential to be very awkward. Should I flag this to my boss?

Unless you have reason to think your ex’s wife wouldn’t handle the situation professionally, I wouldn’t be terribly worried, especially since you wouldn’t be working together closely.

That said, I tend to believe more information is better than less, so you could mention it to your boss and let her make the call on whether it’s something she wants to consider. If you do, be clear that you don’t have any reason to think poorly of the candidate or to think she’d conduct herself unprofessionally but are just flagging it in case she wants to be aware of the connection. You could frame it as, “I don’t know her at all and I’d have no problem interacting with her just like I would with any other colleague, but I figured I’d mention it in case it’s the kind of connection you’d rather know about.”

Comments

[minoanmiss]

LW: sensibly thinking forward or stirring shit? Ex's current wife: threat or menace?

[cimorene]

Unless there's something they're not telling in the letter - like something more significant than "not great" - they are being weird.

[lassarina]

I agree with AAM's response, and I have to say that as a vibrating ball of anxiety and neuroses, I too would look at a [badly-split] ex's new[er] partner coming into my place of work with some alarm. But I am aware that I am a vibrating ball of anxiety and neuroses, and therefore of questionable authority on such a matter.

Then again I've also seen people come into a workplace, decide they don't like That Person Over There, and manage to turn *everything* in a 100-person organization into a sucking vortex of bullshit in the process of making their political moves to fuck up That Person Over There, so maybe I'm not solely reacting with anxiety.

[azurelunatic]

Yeah, my threat model for the current partner of a not entirely amicable ex would be the ex slandering me or at least describing me without any benefit of the doubt to the current partner. (Especially if I had let go of my temper enough to do some common but shitty things as the relationship was winding down.) And only LW and the ex here know what LW did at that point in time (and I'm sure the ex would strategically forget to mention what he might have done just before LW did those things).

I am also a ball of anxiety, especially social anxiety. This is vaguely warranted by a history of being The Weird One with undiagnosed ADHD, and a near-complete social rejection by my peers starting in preschool and proceeding until I found my gang in my sophomore year of high school. I cannot sustain a mask long-term.

I am primed to think about not-great ends of relationships today because a crappy dude in the news bears a strong resemblance to a crappier ex of mine; my ex was also in the news for bad reasons a few years ago and the partner who succeeded me requested that I write a letter of support (read: informal testimony about that crappy ex's character) which stirred up a lot of the dregs of stuff best forgotten.

[lassarina]

So sorry to hear about the dregs :( That's never a good place to be.

And yeah, my threat model would be very much like that.

[ethelmay]

I am wondering whether the ex's wife even knows that LW works there. Not that it matters unless she applied there on purpose because of that, which would be super weird. If it's just a big place where anyone might happen to apply, then it's not weird they both did.