I [31F] work with a guy [3?M] for a year who I get on generally really well with – he doesn’t really talk to me very often when we are working remotely, but when we are at work meetups face-to-face, we can talk for hours and he seems to remember things that came up in conversations months ago. We have a few communication difficulties because he is very direct and I am not, we both seem to be quite stubborn people, and chat communication is easy to misinterpret. But mostly he is someone I enjoy talking to a lot, and it almost seems like he’s become friendlier towards me since we resolved the one or two disagreements we’ve had like adults. When we greet each other now, he usually hugs me rather than shaking my hand.
I met his fiancée yesterday at a work party and she is super nice and we had some good conversation. I had my Polaroid camera with me and offered to take pictures for a few people that they could keep, and I did one for them, which they seemed quite happy about (maybe not as jump-in-the-air enthusiastically happy as other coworkers who had their photo taken, but neither of them seem like jump-in-the-air sort of people). My partner played a Switch game with him for a while, while me and coworker’s partner watched and got to know one another.
I’ve ummed and aahed about asking to meet up with my colleague before, mostly because I was petrified of giving off the wrong impression to either my partner or his partner, or it might have been too weird to meet up as a group of four. But now I get on with his fiancée as well, so I am even more interested in hanging out with the both of them together with my partner.
They live quite far away (3-4 hours), but me and my partner want to go to a theme park pretty close to where they live in August. We would need to arrive the day before our theme park outing, so we would have some time to kill in the evening. I was thinking about asking them via my colleague if they both want to go for a beer with us.
As an adult, I struggle with being withdrawn and standoffish, because of bad experiences with rejection and being too clingy as a teenager/young adult. I don’t want my coworker to feel forced to hang out with me or to feel the sting of a rejection I should have seen coming. How do I go about this in a way that isn’t going to leave me wondering if I’ve creeped him out? Will it look too manufactured that I “happen to be in town”? Will it be weird to just message him when we don’t talk so much on there?
TL;DR: get on well with coworker, met his partner and like her, unsure how to set up over chat a meetup for the four of us (me, coworker, coworker’s fiancée, my partner) when we live quite far away without creeping him out
2 comments
“(Partner) and I will be in your area on (date). Would you and (fiance) be interested in going out?
Are you only meeting for drinks or are you including them in going to the theme park?
Be honest about what you want. You want to meet up w your coworker with your guy and he and his gal. Basically a double date because you all get along well. That’s the truth and it’s enough.The more you try to mask your intention, the more it will look manufactured. What you want isn’t a big deal. People hang out all the time, especially those who get along.
It’s better to learn to accept rejections gracefully than to avoid them. Because you never know when one is coming. And to live that way is to live in needless fear.