THE MIDULTS

Annabel Rivkin and Emilie McMeekan Uncomfortable

QDear A&E: A school mother is flirting with my husband and it’s making me feel uneasy. My husband laughs it off to me but seems to go along with it when she smiles and chats to him as we are picking up our children from school. I’m sure the other parents have noticed it too and I don’t want to become the talk of the school gates. She’s single, which makes it worse. I feel jealous and embarrassed –

ABy the time you even get to the highly triggering place that is the school gates you will have been in your relationship for a good few years. You will have been through the sleepless nights and the parenting anxiety; you will be past the honeymoon period and well into the toenail period, and your resources are probably considerably depleted. Your relationship may be, to a greater or lesser extent, on autopilot. While the boring everyday is comforting and healthy, you may not have the energy to give your marriage the oxygen required to make it blaze. When you are in survival mode, it is easy to see threat wherever you turn.

First, it sounds as though you are worried about other people’s perceptions of what is occurring – in your longer letter you say you do not think he would have an affair, you are just concerned about what people think and how this is making you feel. Well, if you live your life trying to please everyone, you will please no one – least of all yourself. If you start worrying about school gate judgment, then the potential for panic is bottomless: how you look, the state of your car, the state of your kitchen, the holidays you take, your child’s haircut... this way, madness lies. You do you, Uncomfortable, and leave the other parents to worry about doing them.

This other mother is smiling and chatting, not pouting and propositioning. It would be weirder if she didn’t smile and chat. We are all oppressively perky at drop off and pick up. Single mothers can have a particularly hard time with the school bonding thing. There is an old-fashioned tendency to write them off as either tragic or predatory when, in the vast majority of cases, they are simply trying to form relationships that will lead to play dates and well-rounded friendships for their children. Two-parent families tend to pull up the drawbridge at weekends, or hang out with other families that are similarly configured to them; but for single parents the school gates may be the only opportunity to establish common ground.

The wisest and kindest thing you could do would be to take this woman out for a cup of coffee. Make friends with her. It is highly unlikely that she is after your husband. Trying to pull a married dad at the school gates would be little short of idiotic. Yes, it happens, but seeking out that kind of chaos is unusual.

But your main project should not be to neutralise her; it should be to look at your own relationship. It sounds as though you are jealous, not because you fear he is going to leap into bed with her, but because you are in attention deficit. Maybe you want him to laugh at your jokes; to sit up a bit and notice you again. You are feeling under-powered, so you are projecting power on to her. If you are feeling a little neglected, it can’t be nice to see your husband pleasantly diverted by another woman’s conversation – but if you feel paranoid every time he is pleasantly diverted, that’s not going to do anything positive for your marriage.

Worrying and feeling awkward isn’t the same as working on your marriage. In fact it is more likely to poison than to protect. Carping, “I don’t like the way she flirts with you – why do you allow it?” deflects from the issue and may make your husband feel monitored and accused.

Instead, flirt with him yourself. Go out to dinner. When something funny happens in your day, make a mental note to share it with him. Get that attention flowing again. Make it clear that you love and desire him – not through jealousy, but through proactive, positive reinforcement. In terms of your feelings, speculate in order to accumulate. Try a little love-bombing. This could be very good for your marriage, Uncomfortable. If we deal with our own unease, we can often end up in a much happier place.