Wife new coworker
My wife of 4 years (been together over 10 years) with 2 girls, 1 and 3 years old, works in purchasing for a construction company. We are both in our late 30s. I work from home full time, she works from home 3 days a week. She got a new teammate who is about 30 years old. This guy has only worked there less than 3 weeks.
Whenever I go into the room that she works in, I would notice that she’s chatting on Teams with this guy. At first I figured it was just normal training him or answering questions about the job since he’s new. Well everyday I would go in the office to see what she wants for lunch, she would have their conversation pulled up. I asked her what all they talk about and apparently a lot of it started out as talking about another co worker that he has a crush on. So her and him, working with each other for just a few days are talking about out how he has a crush on this girl and he is talking to my wife about her like everyday he would say she’s so pretty, etc. really immature stuff, reminded me of 6th grader behavior. He wanted my wife to help him get with her. My wife tried and the girl was not interested.
Since then, he doesn’t talk about the girl he had a crush on anymore, and he just chats with my wife all day, from 7:30am to 4:30 pm. Once I realized they were chatting all day, everyday I asked my wife if I could see some of the conversations. He’s worked there less than 3 weeks and there are thousands of messages back and forth. Very few of the messages are work related. The rest are all just chatting and getting to know one another. She has send him pictures of our 2 girls and 3 cats, getting to know each other really well.
Yesterday, she left work early to take my daughter to a dr appointment. He messaged her to make sure she got home ok. In one message they were talking about middle names and he asked what my name was, she answered and his response is “that’s not very good, you should rename him.” She only responded with I like it and they went back on about their conversation. She thanked him for giving her a piece of gum and he says ANYTHING FOR YOU! And she did the blush reaction on it. She’s hearted some of his other messages. She talks to him in a way that she doesn’t with me like giddy middle schoolers I don’t even read through all the messages either, this was just all I saw. I told her that I think it’s inappropriate and she disagrees. I said if hr was to see these messages, would they think this is normal workplace behavior or appropriate. After that she deleted all the messages, but still stands on the grounds that this is normal.
In all our years together, I’ve never seen her act like this with someone before. She has always been very loyal to me. To be fair, she doesn’t initiate the conversations much, he does, but then she will ask follow up questions and kind of encourage it to keep going. This is even after I asked her to please try to keep things professional and work related with him. The one that really bugs me is when she was checking on her to make sure she made it home from work ok. I can’t imagine me doing something like this with my female co workers. Does not compute.
Am I wrong to feel that this could be something brewing here? Thousands of non work related messages with a new co worker in just a few weeks, where some of them seem to be borderline inappropriate. She says she has no feelings for him and not attracted to him as well. How do I navigate this
TLDR; wife has new co worker and they have already exchanged thousands of chats together (not about work). Started off about him being attracted to another girl in the office, but after being rejected by her, all his focus is now on chatting with my wife. Some of the chats feel inappropriate to me. Trying to figure out if I am overreacting or how to navigate this.
Thank you for any responses.