Woman's boss/husband wants divorce, reveals affair with younger colleague. UPDATE

Deep breath, everyone.We scoured posts over multiple sites and multiple years to track this story. It is baffling. Here we go.My husband is my boss — and we’re getting divorcedFeuersternWaCa I am asking for advice about how to handle my impending divorce at work. I work at a large nonprofit in a specialist capacity that is a recognized priority for the company, but organizationally belongs to one of five departments. I’ve worked here for 10 years. I was headhunted by the executive director, and have worked myself up to the specialist position I have now. My husband of 28 years has been employed at the nonprofit for 20 years, and during the last five he has been the head of the department I am in — my boss. The organization has many married couples on all levels. (The former executive director was married to the head of the largest and most important department.) My husband has previously given me worse conditions than others to avoid being accused of favoring me, to the point that the director had to step in. It has not been easy, but I have done my utmost to behave professionally and keep my private life as separate from my work as humanly possible. Now my husband/head of department has asked for a divorce suddenly and unexpectedly, as he is having an affair with a colleague. The divorce is a great shock, made worse by the fact that our daughter is critically ill and faces a long, hard recovery. My soon-to-be ex-husband has the power to cut my funding, lay me off, give negative feedback to the director about me, badmouth me, and make my life even harder than it is. I normally have a good rapport with the director, but should I tell him about the divorce and illness or not? I wish to remain professional and private, but without telling him about the divorce I have no way of protecting myself from the persecution that I fear from my ex-husband. On the other hand, the director might lay me off himself to avoid problems with my ex-husband. My priority is to keep my job, since finding a new one is next to impossible and I need the insurance for my daughter. This got a lot of attention from readers.Littorally Seriously. I read the title and went “oh no” and then as I kept reading the 'oh no' in my head just got louder and louder. charo Why isn’t the daughter covered under HIS insurance, if she’s his daughter? A lawyer is a very good idea in this case. I got a year’s salary assettlement from an awful nonprofit and was thrilled to leave, after a very minor Worker’s Comp. case, when I got a lawyer. The boss had wanted me gone, as he wanted the previous asst. mgr. gone [she threatened to sue them, I lucked out].I assume they had insurance to pay out this much money. Everyone pretended it was a big injury when it was a minor fall. Workers Comp. takes on a life of its own, it seems, esp. when you hire a lawyer. Nonprofits can be as dysfunctional as for-profits, or more. Kate R I was trying to keep it together until the director had to step in over the way her husband was treating her and the intervention was not, “a person should not report to their spouse”. Just, what the hell? A I have soooo many thoughts/feelings about this… and yet.. am speechless. Aside from saying that I am so, so sorry for OP. And I’d like to punch soon-to-be-ex in some not so nice spots. Ugh. Free Meerkats I showed this to my retired HR person wife. She read the first two paragraphs and was shaking her head. I said, “keep scrolling.” and her eyes kept getting bigger. When she finished she just got up, muttered, “WTF, glad I’m out.” and wandered away. People were upset, but it seemed like the case had gone cold.Until, a full 5 months later, the OP returned with an update:FeuersternWaCa I appreciated the advice and the comments. I most of all appreciated a clear view of my situation. The divorce will be finalised in six months and I have moved out. Not having to be in contact with my ex-husband privately has helped a lot. In the comments there were questions on the age and paternity of my daughter. She is a very young adult and my now ex-husband is her father, but since he abandoned her so heartlessly I cannot bring myself to use the word “our.” She says she has lost her father and that is the truth. She is thank god doing well now and does not need medical treatment – or the insurance – anymore so that is a big relief. I always knew that my place of work had an unhealthy culture but I am happy to be confirmed in that belief and shown just how toxic it is. However, the situation now is clearly untenable and I am looking for another job, of course. It is difficult but I hope to be able to land one in 2021. Regarding my current job. I continue to keep the divorce a secret and plan to do so as long as possible. So far, my soon-to-be ex-husband has agreed. He is going to have a new boss very soon, and that will probably be someone from the outside who may not be onboard with the prevalent unhealthy culture – at least not in the beginning, so he is afraid of what will happen if the abandonment and affair comes to light in a way he cannot control. Someone asked in the comments if my husband is the boss of his new girlfriend. And yes he is: she is a member of the same department as I am, and the affair has been going on for years behind my back now. Thank god I do not work in teams with her and never see her due to Covid, because that would be untenable. I thought my ex-husband was a bad manager even before the divorce. That, and the loss of respect I have for him now, makes going through meetings with him very difficult – thank god for Covid restrictions. We have very few meetings now. I have declined the “career development meetings” that employees are offered here; there is no point, since I have no faith that he is the least interested in me developing my career. The reason I have kept my silence is that the director gave me a new assignment – a large project – not long after i wrote to you. This assignment may well be my ticket to another job, and if I had disclosed the divorce to him it would have cost me the assignment and most likely my job. Actually, what I took most to heart from your advice was the level of toxicity in the organisation: I realise that my faith in the director is misplaced and that he has a large part in creating and sustaining this culture. Believing that he would want to change this culture or even take my concerns about retaliation from my ex-husband seriously is naive and any faith that my husband’s new boss is going to be a better manager is naive too. So I will leave as soon as I can, keep my silence as long as I can and when my husband goes public with his mistress, now girlfriend, at my workplace I am going to behave with as much dignity as I possibly can. Of course I will warn any of your readers, indeed anyone, against working in an organisation that allows one spouse to manage the other. It is, as you and others said, a huge red flag and the only thing there is to do is to get out as soon as possible. So that is what I am going to do. This update prompted new responses from people who had read and wondered what ended up happening.Ms. Yvonne LW, this situation is awful. Sounds like you have made the best of the sh!t sandwich you’ve got. All the best, may you land a new job ASAP! Mental Lentil I’m so sorry you are going through this, but I’m happy that your daughter is doing better, and that you are working to put this behind you. I wish you the best of luck with your job search. "I am going to behave with as much dignity as I possibly can." This is a good choice. People will remember your husband for being a philanderer, and they will remember you for handling everything with dignity and grace. Rising above is sometime difficult in the short run, but generally best in the long run. Someday this will all be ten years ago. Forrest OP, you sound like you are doing wonderfully, but just as a suggestion, I would start seeing a therapist and continue to see them as you leave this job and transition into a new one. I think you are seeing a lot of the dysfunction now, but I think something like 6 months after you move into your next, hopefully less-dysfunctions workplace the RAGE is going to hit you like a ton of bricks and it would be good to have a place to handle that. Miss Marple You are an incredibly dignified and strong woman. Your husband does not deserve you. I hope your pragmatic and wise decision will help you through the toxic environment you find yourself in. Wonderful to read you are biding your time and your new project is your ticket out of that company. Wishing you all the best in getting the job you deserve. Your attitude is setting you are beautifully for better times. With no update for a while, it seemed the story was over and readers were left unsatisfied.Then, TWO YEARS LATER, the OP was suddenly back,with that fascinating post we craved. This time on Reddit.FeuersternWaCa I am the letter writer who wrote in, in the middle of a divorce from my boss, who left me for a younger employee. Firstly, I want to thank both you and the readers for your compassion and kindness. Neither you nor the readers gloated or said I got what I deserved, and I am so grateful for that. Your compassion and kind advice showed me that I was reacting normally to an utter unteneable situation: you restored my sence of normalcy and my confidence, and I am so grateful. The one and a half years since my letter was printed has been eventful, to say the least. To start, I work at the same company in the same position. As I wrote in my original letter, I wanted to stay in the job because my young adult daughter was seriously ill and in psychiatric treatment, and needed the insurance for her treatment. Furthermore, I am a top specialist in a very narrow field with few job opportunities, so a change of job would mean moving to another part of the country and I could not bear to leave my daughter behind without the support of a parent, and my ex-husband is not what I call a parent. Half of my original problem is solved, as my ex-husband resigned as head of department a few months ago, to my immense relief. However, the time after my original letter and until his resignation was bonkers. As expected, my ex-husband/boss started belittling me and questioning my qualifications in meetings with me and my collegues, he started withdrawing my funding, and he started placing very important project meetings on the exact days and times he had sent me on jobs outside the institution. I believe his plan was either to force me to resign, or to make sure I had so many stress-related sick days, that the institution could fire me. In the same period, two collegues, both excellent specialists, resigned (and resignations are very rare here), in protest of my ex-husband/boss’s ´treatment of them. Both of them had meetings with the director, where they documented the ways in which my ex-husband/boss was a terrible manager and explained that they left because of him. The director did absolutely nothing with that information. One commenter remarked that “a fish rots from the head” and that is certainly the case here. In our only meeting, the director stated that the indepencence and autonomy of the head of department (my ex-husband) was his first priority, so he would not put a stop to what he called the “alleged mistreatment” and that his second was to make sure that I conducted myself professionally towards my ex-husband/boss. He said that my objections to being managed by my ex-husband during a divorce process showed that I was overly emotional, because he had complete trust in my ex’s abilities as a manager. In my country (not the States), employers have a legal obligation to create a safe work environment, so he was breaking the law as well as being a jerk. I had to call in sick after that meeting. The end came when my boss/ex-husband and the director in secret fostered a plan to get rid of me and another colleague. My ex/boss stated that I and the colleague, our most excellent senior specialist, were getting too old and needed to be replaced in a short number of years (we are 15 and 17 years away from the official retirement age). The solution should be to hire completely inexperienced recent graduates, order me and my colleague to train them to our specialist level, and then have them replace us while we would be fired because of “budget cuts.” To make matters worse, all senior specialists receive no funding from the department budget, but have to apply for our funding ourselves from external sources. This has been a long-time point of contention. My ex-husband/boss had for years stated that the institution was much too poor to fund even the slightest bit of the senior staff (and especially me). Now we learned that these new employees woud be fully funded by the institution. My boss/ex and the director fostered this plan and kept it secret in order to have it sustained by the board, but we got wind of it. The secrecy and the plan did not go down well with either us nor the other senior specialists, who would of course be the next ones to be deemed too old and fired on the flimsiest of pretenses after having trained their successors. I asked for a meeting with my boss/ex in order to discuss the plan and if possible avoid a big blowout at the next department meeting. That meeting went badly: my boss/ex said I was being paranoid as usual. (The “as usual” refers to an incident that took place in private a year earlier; I then confronted him having learned from a colleague that he was having a long-time affair with another of his employees. That affair apparently started while my mother was in hospice care 5 years ago.) Asked about the issues with funding, he stated that “of course the senior staff would receive some compensation for the time we used on training our (fully funded) replacements.” I still don’t know how i managed to refrain from tellling him exactly what he could do to himself. The next department meeting was dramatic, to say the least. All senior specialists opposed the plan, the funding, and opposed the way my ex-husband/boss had handled the process, and the mistrust towards him was palpable. My ex/boss resigned from his position as head of department and took a demotion a week after the meeting: apparently he and the director realized that the only other choice was to fire 10 renowned specialists, which would lead to very bad publicity. However, not all is well: Upper management still suck and is not going to change. the director has hired a person with absolutely no prior management experience to fill the now vacant position as head of department. And of course, the “generational transfer” is going to come back. Management is even talking about “re-integrating the ex-boss into the department again ” — good luck with that. Morale in the department is at an all-time low, and upper management is working overtime to free themselves for responsibility for the dumpster fire they have ignited. The good part is that my daughter is doing much better. In six months, perhaps a year, she will no longer need the level of support she does now and then my institutions will see my dust. I realize that this update is tragicomic and the whole process seems grotesque. However, being in the middle of it felt like a nightmare, as I fought my way through an acrimonious divorce from an emotionally and financially abusive husband/boss while my work life was under attack from said husband/boss, who was given free range by a director telling me I was “overly emotional” for even suggesting that I did not trust said abusive boss/ex-husband’s ability to manage me while divorcing me. At that point I seriously questioned my sanity. Thank you for coming to my rescue. As Alison has pointed out, toxic environments can twist your sense of normalcy, and I am so grateful to Alison and the wonderful readers for giving sound and sane advise, kindness and compassion, that restored my sense of normalcy and my confidence and put me in a place where I am finally ready to move on. Okay, everyone stretch, get a sip of water, and settle in for the final comments:Overall-Scholar-4676 You need to tell… especially since it’s a colleague dating your husband.. he can manipulate you in the divorce by threatening your job… don’t let him do this to you.. he will try to keep you from getting anything in the divorce by using dangling your job over you.. Throwawaaawa I mean, what can she do? At the beginning she was thinking of speaking to the director, then she realized that it would do nothing because the director would not be on her side. She was absolutely right. She needs to find a new job, which she can't do because that would mean relocating and she can't do that until her daughter is well. She could get a lawyer (with what money? With what energy? While also dealing with a divorce?!) in which case she'd make her boss incredibly angry, and then what? She keeps working at the place with the toxic work environment and hope that people will be chill about it because it would be illegal not to be chill about it? Who is giving her a reference when she tries to find a job in the very small field she works at? The very small field that is comprised of people who are probably friends with the boss she made an enemy of? replicantradio I read this recently and wow wow wow at how dysfunctional and sh*tty this all is. OP really needs to get out. samse15 Why she hasn’t retained the services of a lawyer and absolutely taken that place apart is beyond me. Is age discrimination not a thing in her country? I’m sure there’s more that a good lawyer could focus on. Keytarfriend Double yikes. Married people cannot and must not report to one another. Even if they conduct themselves appropriately, it's at the very least a perceived conflict of interest. Managers also must not date their subordinates, either. They are in a position of power over them and there is an implied threat to their livelihood if they refuse. Even without the 'divorce' aspect, this company was not Businessing correctly. Tough_Claim7543 I mean how does this place even allow an affair to happen? I know places where people got fired for having affairs with their collegues. My male colleague got fired because he was having an affair with his assitant. opinionated_sloth There's so many layers of yikes in there, I don't even know where to start. I hope her daughter got better quickly and they both managed to get the hell away. Green_Juggernaut1428 Being in such a niche field that your employment options are limited really sucks. I was in indirect auto finance for a number of years. It's a niche subset of banking where it doesnt take long to eventually know at least one person at every competitor in the area. It's a 'musical chairs' type of sales environment where getting fired isnt rare and it's all too common to find yourself without a 'seat' when it's your turn to jump on the carousel. The pay is good but damn there's just no stability. I met my wife while working in this industry. Years later we're still in it with 3 kids, wondering when the axe would fall for one of us (most likely me as she's MUCH better at it than I am) because it comes for everyone at some point so I made a career change into IT. It's a bad position to be in. Now it's a niche industry that's flooded with applicants. From the sounds of it, OP's situation is even more niche than that. It's a horrible corner to get yourself painted into. It is clearly a lot to unpack, and there are many factors involved. But, if you were in this woman's shoes, how would you react and what would you do?