Breakups·
THE LUNCHBOX UPGRADE
After divorcing over childlessness, a 26-year-old woman keeps baking lunches for her new boyfriend, stirring workplace ridicule and a tangled feud that tests her loyalties and judgment.
Keep sending lunch, or step back?
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Her ex-husband's coworkers were making jokes about her "upgrading," and now he wanted her to stop sending lunch with her new boyfriend.
The woman at the center of it is 26, and she says her marriage ended after she found out she couldn't have children. She says she was fine staying child-free, but her husband wasn't. He wanted a "mini me" and wanted to "pass on his legacy." For the most part, she says, they had a good marriage, until that became the end of it.
Since then, she says she's learned there's better out there. Her boyfriend, she says, is "the kindest person I've ever met." The relationship is new, seven months old, but in a small town, that's already enough for everyone to know everyone else's business. And in this case, the boyfriend works with the ex-husband.
They're both military contractors on airfields. Not in the exact same role, but close enough to be in the same area with the same guys. That matters, because the poster likes to cook and bake, and she has a habit of packing lunches for the men she's with. She says she used to make her ex-husband's lunch and send him off to work with baked goods. She's taken extensive culinary classes around baking, and she says people have told her her food is really good.
So she kept doing it.
When she met her boyfriend, he told her he had always loved the stuff she made for the shop when she was married to her ex. Now she packs his lunch and sends food with him to work. And that's where things started getting awkward.
The guys at work began giving the ex-husband "shit." According to her, dating has been going very badly for him, and the teasing has made him dread going in. The boyfriend, meanwhile, is apparently more attractive than the ex, and the coworkers have been joking that she said, "I upgraded from one mechanic to another."
The boyfriend doesn't mind. In fact, the jokes make him look good, and the other men tell him he's lucky.
The ex-husband does not see it that way.
He sent her a long message asking her to "stop sending stuff to work with my boyfriend so the guys will leave him alone." He also asked her "not to come to their annual 4th of July thing."
She says he's making his problems her problem, and she doesn't think it's a fair request. But she's second-guessing herself and wants to know whether she should stop, or whether most people would think she should.