Her hubby has taken over our lunches for the ladies

Dear Coleen

I’m part of a group of eight ladies who met while working for the same company and we kept in touch after we were all made redundant. We meet for lunch once a month and have been doing so for 11 years. We all drive, but one lady is driven to our venue by her husband. He used to drop her off then pick her up a couple of hours later but at Christmas he invited himself to our festive lunch and has been joining us ever since, uninvited. Anyone with a birthday chooses the venue for that month and he insisted on choosing the venue when his birthday came around, even though one of our ladies had a birthday in the same month. He has also vetoed venues for various reasons – the parking is poor, he doesn’t want to tackle the one-way system, he doesn’t like the venue and so on. He is taking over our lunches! We are not happy with this state of affairs, but are not sure how to deal with it. His wife is our friend and we wouldn’t want our meetings to fizzle out because of him. We believe that his wife could drive herself and not involve him at all. We have never invited him to join us and our husbands wouldn’t dream of barging in uninvited.

Coleen says

I think it’s possible to tell your friend, but in a nice way. The line you should take is that it’s always been about the girls, it’s “our thing” and none of the other husbands are involved. You could perhaps suggest getting together with all your husbands as a separate social occasion that becomes a regular thing. To be honest, if she takes offence, then there are still seven of you so it doesn’t mean the whole thing has to collapse because one person drops out. In my opinion your friend’s husband sounds a bit controlling, so she might be going along with it to keep the peace – she might not actually want him to be there either. So bite the bullet and speak up – it just needs one of you to mention it. I think if all of you were there, she might feel a bit ganged up on. Maybe she doesn’t like driving, so why not offer to pick her up and drop her back home too? That way she’ll have no reason to involve her hubby.

We aren’t happy but don’t know how to tackle it