Dear Mary:

“I just do not know what to do, if I should do anything about it”- I vote for not doing anything about it because you work with him. If you make your feelings known to him, it can make your work environment (and his) very uncomfortable. Like you wrote, neither one of you is “in a rush to have a relationship”, so no good reason to risk an uncomfortable work environment because once it’s uncomfortable, it will be very difficult to reverse it, no way to take your words back.

He labeled his relationship with you as a marriage in the context of work (“agreeing that I am pretty much his ‘work wife'”), so that’s how he views it. For whatever reason he doesn’t view his relationship with you outside work.

anita