A few weeks ago, I wrote about a friend of mine who was posting a countdown of her husband's homecoming on Facebook. I asked your advice about whether or not I should try to talk to her. Y'all came through for me, and gave me the boost I needed to gather my courage and talk to her.
As we were walking out of a meeting together, I asked her how her husband was doing, and mentioned that I had noticed that it had been a few days since she posted to Facebook. She said that he was doing well, and that it was x-number of days until he came home.
I took a deep breath and said, "Look, I am hoping I can say this without offending you... and I'm hoping you just don't realize how your posting his homecoming date is kind of unsafe. I'm only bringing it up because I have a couple of friends whose husbands' homecomings were delayed because another wife posted that same type of information on Facebook, and I would hate for the same thing to happen to your husband."
I could tell that she was embarrassed, but I gently pressed on to tell her how I don't want to make her feel bad, but I also didn't want her husband to get in trouble.
She responded by saying that, actually, someone else had already spoken to her about it, which was why she hadn't posted recently.
I mumbled an apology, and the conversation sort of awkwardly ended there.
I guess I'm glad I said something, but I ended up feeling that I'd overstepped my bounds. The good news is that we've seen each other a few times since that conversation, and there doesn't seem to be any residual feelings of awkwardness. We've said hello to each other and had a couple of brief conversations about other things, but I still feel weird.
Have you had an awkward encounter like this recently? How do you move on??
