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In which Ask Amy, as usual, gives terrible advice:
Dear Amy: My wife of over 25 years is foreign-born.
She travels to her home country for an extended period almost every year. I’ll join her for a few weeks, and she’ll stay a while longer after I return home.
Recently when she returned home, she told me that after I had left, she was introduced to a male acquaintance of her family’s. She said that they did not have a conversation, but did notice that he stared at her constantly.
Afterward this man tracked her down and sent her a text message, which she let me read. It was quite lengthy and frankly, incredibly audacious. He told her how attractive she is, how he wanted to spend time with her, and suggested how to discreetly contact him to arrange a rendezvous.
Her response to him was overly polite: “I’m flattered, but I’m busy. Perhaps some other time.”
I made a note of his phone number and a few weeks later sent him a terse message (I’m fluent in his language), that he was rude, unmannerly, interested only in a sexual encounter with my wife, and to back off.
He did not answer my message; instead he forwarded it to my wife, who got angry and said that I embarrassed her and violated her privacy.
I told her that while I may have ruined her other man fantasy, someone had to put him in his place, and I was proud to do it.
My wife is a very attractive woman. I am aware of the attention she receives. To me, however, that man went way over the top. Did I do the right thing, or was I being meddlesome?
— Just Wondering
Wondering: Your wife shared this man’s text message and her reply, which you describe as “overly polite.” I interpret her message differently.
In its ambiguity, “Perhaps some other time” can be read as something of an invitation. The politeness she extended was to this acquaintance, but not necessarily to you. In response, you stewed about this for weeks and then acted out in anger toward both of them.
You were trying to protect your marriage by being direct, but your wife is the one who should have drawn a firm boundary around your marriage.
You could have asked her to make a more definitive statement, rather than doing it yourself. She was honest with you regarding how your behavior made her feel.
At this point, without discussing his behavior or hers, you should talk to her sincerely about how this has made you feel: “This text exchange made me very sad and angry. I’m worried about our relationship, and I’m trying to protect it.”
She travels to her home country for an extended period almost every year. I’ll join her for a few weeks, and she’ll stay a while longer after I return home.
Recently when she returned home, she told me that after I had left, she was introduced to a male acquaintance of her family’s. She said that they did not have a conversation, but did notice that he stared at her constantly.
Afterward this man tracked her down and sent her a text message, which she let me read. It was quite lengthy and frankly, incredibly audacious. He told her how attractive she is, how he wanted to spend time with her, and suggested how to discreetly contact him to arrange a rendezvous.
Her response to him was overly polite: “I’m flattered, but I’m busy. Perhaps some other time.”
I made a note of his phone number and a few weeks later sent him a terse message (I’m fluent in his language), that he was rude, unmannerly, interested only in a sexual encounter with my wife, and to back off.
He did not answer my message; instead he forwarded it to my wife, who got angry and said that I embarrassed her and violated her privacy.
I told her that while I may have ruined her other man fantasy, someone had to put him in his place, and I was proud to do it.
My wife is a very attractive woman. I am aware of the attention she receives. To me, however, that man went way over the top. Did I do the right thing, or was I being meddlesome?
— Just Wondering
Wondering: Your wife shared this man’s text message and her reply, which you describe as “overly polite.” I interpret her message differently.
In its ambiguity, “Perhaps some other time” can be read as something of an invitation. The politeness she extended was to this acquaintance, but not necessarily to you. In response, you stewed about this for weeks and then acted out in anger toward both of them.
You were trying to protect your marriage by being direct, but your wife is the one who should have drawn a firm boundary around your marriage.
You could have asked her to make a more definitive statement, rather than doing it yourself. She was honest with you regarding how your behavior made her feel.
At this point, without discussing his behavior or hers, you should talk to her sincerely about how this has made you feel: “This text exchange made me very sad and angry. I’m worried about our relationship, and I’m trying to protect it.”
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Amy, by now, should be familiar with the concept of the "soft no" -- women are socialized that saying "no" directly is rude and likely to have negative consequences, especially if they have reason to be concerned about their safety FROM the person they're saying "no" to.
The wife was being creeped-on, the text message was unsolicited, and SHE SAID NO, AND TOLD HER HUSBAND ABOUT IT.
My guess is that the phrasing of the "audacious" message probably contained some plausible deniability (so that if she outright said "I'm not interested in you romantically or sexually, I'm married," the note-sender could claim that it was all perfectly innocent, he was just giving her a compliment, why is she overreacting and being rude, etc.)
It can also be actively dangerous to give a hard no -- and given that this person has connections to her family, she may not have felt safe or socially comfortable doing so.
She acted with integrity and was honest with her husband, and both he and Amy are acting like she did something wrong by trying to politely get away from this jerk hitting on her.
It is very, very common to "freeze" or "fawn" when someone does something that makes you uncomfortable, and it sounds like the phrasing of her response was an attempt to deal with the awkwardness of receiving the text, in a way that didn't cause offense and get this already-creepy person angry at her.
Now, of course, her husband AND Amy seem to think that she is responsible for the unwanted proposition, and that her attempt at politeness was really a suggestion that she welcomed future advances.
So, her husband has been given carte blanche to continue to be a judgmental ass about it, as well as told that his inappropriate choice to send a scathing text "on his marriage's behalf" was entirely fine.
FFS.
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The man in question is definitely over the line (at least for my culture) but it seems like he accepted the no! We hear about the cases where the soft 'no' doesn't work and things go very bad, but the reason women are socialized to it is that it often *does* work.
LW by responding you've just opened up the lines of communication again (and you may have even gotten your wife thinking about how this other man knows how to take 'no' for an answer and you... apparently don't.) You've shot yourself in the foot.
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Dude, you do nor own your wife and your chest-beating response is indeed mortifying. Also don't listen to Amy. If your wife were planning a dalliance she wouldn't've told you about this, and she was gentle with the obnoxious guy because so many men (ahem!) fly off the handle.
Dear wife: I am so, so sorry. I wish you all luck and hope your husband sees sense.
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Like, in French, "au revoir" literally means "until we meet again," but it's the most common conversational form of "goodbye."
I think that the language she chose also had to do with avoiding the outraged retort of "I never suggested such a thing!" if she bluntly said "don't proposition me for an affair, I'm not interested."
Saying "no" to a man is, unfortunately, an occasion in which women often encounter verbal abuse or violence, so we wind up trying to cushion it to avoid dealing with fallout from their feelings of rejection and anger.
(I know that it's not exclusively gendered this way, but it's something that people raised AFAB have to deal with more frequently.)
And, yes, she went directly to her husband and showed him the inappropriate message and her response -- if she'd been deceitful, all she had to do was to say nothing.
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Instead you interacted with a stranger as a threat, who your wife didn't treat as one. Now you need to let her know why you were threatened and why you didnt’ confide in her first at a more fraught level. You might want to go to a counsellor to help you open communications at this fraught level. Be prepared to really listen to her and explain your feelings of mistrust, and know she understandably won’t be happy about being mistrusted, and that’s going to take some fixing, which is what you probably need a councellor for.
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Her husband, who she brought this to, has no reason to mistrust her.
Again, we only have his word for the *translated* contents of her response (in her first language), and we don't know exactly what the message from the creep said . . . so, if he'd asked her out to lunch, "perhaps another time" was her way of saying a soft no.
(In French, "au revoir" means "until we meet again," but is used as "goodbye" -- we don't actually know exactly WHAT she said in her own language, only that she was trying to say that she was uninterested in his proposition.)