agonyaunt | Ask a Manager: creepy boyfriend "intervenes"

A reader writes:

My girlfriend recently went on a business trip with her boss. After meeting with their clients for dinner, the two of them headed back to the hotel and had some drinks in the lobby.

I’m completely fine with my girlfriend having one or two drinks with her boss for an hour in the hotel lobby. Not a big deal. Perfectly fine.

The problem was they spent 3+ hours drinking together and she didn’t get back to her hotel room to call me until 11:30 p.m. When she called me, she was totally drunk.

Now I believe her boss crossed the line from “business” into “personal.” He encroached on our personal relationship.

I would never show up at his work and encroach on his business, and if I did I would expect he would address it with me. Likewise, I would hope that he would never encroach on our personal life, and if he does then I have the right to address him professionally, as it now involves me.

Needless to say, I sent him a professional email outlining my concerns. He was lucky I didn’t involve HR as I think it was extremely inappropriate. Do you agree that I was justified in doing so?

Also, what are appropriate boundaries for drinking alone with the boss on a business trip? Is what I outlined above fair? (Number of drinks, time of night, etc.) I would say nothing past 10:00 p.m. as well.

This isn’t going to be the answer I think you thought it would be.

You emailed your girlfriend’s boss to complain that that he encroached on your personal relationship by socializing with her on a business trip and because she didn’t call you until later that night?

Nooooo.

Your actions and your stance here are frighteningly controlling and wrong.

You had no standing to contact her boss. None.

Your girlfriend is in charge of managing her relationship with her boss and her relationship with you.

I am no fan of getting drunk with coworkers, let alone with bosses, but it’s up to her to decide how she manages her relationships with colleagues. If you have a concern about how those choices impact you or your relationship, you take that up with her. If you’re concerned about how much she drank or with who or for how long or what time she called you, those are issues between the two of you, and that’s where any discussion belongs.

Emailing her boss is far over the line, incredibly undermining to your girlfriend, and just wildly inappropriate.

Your girlfriend is not property that you own. You do not get to complain to other people who she chooses to spend time with, and you definitely don’t get to interfere in her business relationships.

As for her boss being “lucky that you didn’t involve HR” … again, no. You don’t work at this company. You have no standing to involve HR, and there’s nothing to involve HR over anyway. In fact, your girlfriend is the one who’s lucky that you didn’t involve HR, since that would just further add to the professional humiliation you’ve inflicted on her.

And to be clear, what you did was humiliating. You took it upon yourself to try to intervene in her work relationships without her permission, and you’ve almost certainly introduced an incredible awkwardness and tension into her relationship with her boss. You also may have caused her boss to be seriously concerned about her welfare at home, because this kind of control and interference is a pretty well-known flag for abuse.

You owe her a massive apology, but more importantly you owe her (and future partners, because this is a break-up level offense) some serious soul-searching about boundaries and control.

The scariest part of this letter is that you don’t realize that it’s scary at all. Please rethink this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Of the many, many, many red flags in this, what's clearest to me is that he sees this situation as an offense the boss has committed against him (in the guise of "our relationship"). The girlfriend not only has no agency for her own actions, but even if the boss was doing something inappropriate, she has no personhood as the subject of the offense. There is no reading in which this woman is a person: she's an object, and nothing is actually done by or to her, only by or to the men involved.

That flag could not get any redder if it were bled on, which God help me, I actually worry could happen. I hope the girlfriend gets out, NOW.

Yeah, holy cow. It's hard to believe some people actually think this way. The columnist's response is spot-on.

All the other red flags aside, talking to your spouse's employer is just weird. I have called my wife's employer exactly twice, both times to say that she was in the hospital and would call them when she was able to do so.

A couple of people at the original site commented that the LW was basically putting himself level with the boss: the boss was in charge at work, and the LW is in charge in the relationship. Where the woman fits into this is, well, exactly where you'd think.