My boyfriend told everyone I slept with my BOSSES to get my promotion.
The Rise and the Resentment
Samuel and I have been together for just over four years, living together for the last two. We met at a mutual friend’s birthday party at this dive bar downtown, bonding over our shared love of true crime podcasts and terrible reality TV.
Our relationship developed naturally. Casual dating for 6 months, becoming official after he showed up at my apartment with Soup when I had the flu. Moving in together when his lease ended, and talking about marriage after his brother’s wedding last summer.
No official proposal yet, but we’d been discussing timelines and looking at rings online. Well, mostly me looking while he made vague comments about when the time is right.
About two months ago, I got promoted to shift manager at the restaurant where I work. It was a family-owned Italian place that’s been around for 20 years, but the promotion came with a decent raise and actual benefits.
I’d been working there for 3 years, starting as a server, and the owners, Pablo and Joanna, had been training me for management for the last year. When they offered me the position, I was thrilled.
Samuel seemed happy, too, at first. He brought me flowers. We went out to celebrate and he posted about it on social media calling me his boss lady.
Samuel works at a warehouse doing shipping and receiving. He’s been there for 5 years, same position, same shift. He says he likes the predictability and doesn’t want the stress of management, which I always respected.
We made about the same money before my promotion, splitting everything 50/50, and it worked fine. The changes happened fast.
The week after I started my new position, I had to stay late for inventory training. When I got home around 11 p.m., Samuel was on the couch playing video games.
He didn’t look up when I walked in, just said, “Must be nice to be important enough to work late.” I thought he was joking, so I laughed it off and went to heat up the leftover Chinese food in the fridge.
The next morning, I had to go in early for a manager meeting. Samuel was off weekends and we usually did grocery shopping together on Saturday mornings.
When I reminded him I’d be at work, he rolled his eyes, “Right, because you’re management now.”
Again, his tone was weird, but I was running late and didn’t have time to address it. That weekend set the pattern for what would come.
Every time I mentioned work, he’d make some snide comment. When I told him about implementing a new scheduling system, he said, “Wow, revolutionizing the restaurant industry, are we?” When I came home excited about Pablo teaching me the ordering process, Samuel responded with, “Cool.” “You’re learning to buy food.” “Groundbreaking stuff.”
I tried talking to my best friend Jade about it. She said Samuel might be feeling insecure about the changes in our dynamic.
She suggested I include him more, make him feel like part of my success. So, I started sharing less about the actual work and more about the people.
Funny customer stories and harmless gossip about the servers. That seemed to help for about a week. Then came the cooking complaints.
Samuel and I had always split cooking duties. Suddenly, everything I made was wrong. The pasta was overcooked. The chicken was dry and the vegetables were bland.
One night, I made tacos, something we’d eaten probably a hundred times before. He took one bite and pushed his plate away. Did you even season this? When I pointed out it was the same recipe I always used, he said, “Maybe your taste buds are too sophisticated for regular food now.”
Next came the clothes. I’d bought a few new outfits for work. Nothing expensive. Just some black pants and blouses from Target that looked more professional than my server uniform.
Samuel started making comments every morning. That shirt makes you look like you’re trying too hard. Those pants are too tight for work. Why do you need to dress up to manage a restaurant? When I explained that Pablo and Joanna expected managers to look professional, he scoffed. Right. because the restaurant is such a Fortune 500 company.
The family dinner incident happened next. At his parents’ house for Sunday dinner, I overheard Samuel telling his relatives that my manager title was basically meaningless, that I was just a glorified waitress with keys.
He told his uncle that the restaurant made me manager because they needed a woman for diversity, and that I only got promoted because I flirt with the old owners.
His cousin later told me Samuel had been saying, “I act like I’m some CEO,” when really I’m serving spaghetti to suburbanites. When his mom congratulated me on the promotion, Samuel interrupted to say, “It’s not a real management job, Mom.”
“She just schedules teenagers and counts bread sticks.” “I handle more responsibility moving freight than she does playing restaurant.”
The friend comments started 3 weeks into my promotion. Samuel had never had issues with my friends before, but suddenly Jade was toxic.
My coworker friend Edward was obviously into you, and my sister was enabling your ego. Then I found out he’d been telling people at his work that I’d threatened to break up with him if he didn’t step up career-wise.
His coworker pulled me aside at a barbecue to say how sorry he was about the ultimatum I’d given Samuel. I was completely confused until he explained.
Samuel had been telling everyone I was pressuring him to get promoted or go back to school, that I’d said he was embarrassing me with his lack of ambition. None of it was true.
