From a guy's perspective - I don't know what your co-worker's intent was, because I wasn't there, but in general, men do not take such things seriously. Get a group of guys together and we will often make fun of anything and everything another guy does - all in humor. Sometimes, we forget that women were born on Venus and that our humor is not so funny to beings from that planet (that was a joke). He may like you and that was his way of hinting that you should set down your soap and kick up your heels. Then again, maybe he was simply raised as a rude person.
This ^^^^. A 'word of wisdom' line that my hubby always says to the gals in our family whenever we run into situations like yours, Galaxy, is 'Men are pigs'.
Not that he means that men are all hateful beings or anything like that, for hubby treats me and the women in our family like gold (his favorite 'word of wisdom' line to the
guys in the family goes, 'Happy wife, happy life', lol), but as he tells the gals, men 'generally' don't rely so much on the same parts of the brain that we gals 'generally' do, which makes it more easy for them be less easily offended by insulting words (whether intentionally spoken or not) than we gals 'generally' are. Where men generally tend to brush off a perceived insult like so much dust, we gals generally tend to feel like we need to have an anvil lifted off of us.
I've been called all sorts of names all my life by different people for who knows what different reason. Those that spoke them were either most likely projecting their own unhappiness in their life upon me, had never learned any manners and didn't know any better, or I else I may have totally misread things and no insult was actually intended at all. I used to take every single one of them to heart, though, which would ruin days, weeks months and years of my life. I finally came to a point that I said enough! Why should I let such things rule me, especially if they may not even have been intended? It's not worth it to rent the prime real estate in my mind out to such things, so I just don't anymore.
Sure, certain negative words spoken to me might rattle me when first spoken and there may be a little struggle to let them go and get on with my life, but it's not long before they are ceremoniously kicked to the proverbial curb, because, goodness, I've got a million and one better things I want to do!
My words of wisdom? Count your blessings as opposed to the negatives; humor and words of kindness have a miraculous way of disarming people and winning the day more times than not; and- the best revenge is to live a joyful, positive life. :mrgreen:
IrishLass
