I'm coming to you because your sage advice makes me trust that you can help me out.

I'm a straightish, pregnant 33-year-old in Colorado. I've been married for two years and with my husband for six. Here's my dilemma/issue: my husband and I seem to have very different ideas about male/female friendship boundaries. I will be the first to admit that one of my prices of admission is my jealousy. My husband has used this as justification for lying about female friendships he's had in the past, which, as I'm sure you can imagine, did nothing to help my jealousy. He now has a new 22-year-old friend—a girl from work—and I'm struggling. After the previous incidents I alluded to before, one of the things I'm allowed to do is check his text messages if I feel so inclined. (I know you're rolling your eyes, Dan, but please stay with me.) This 22-year-old has made me inclined.

Nothing they have talked about is so extreme that it has me confronting him immediately, Dan, but I am still VERY uncomfortable with the subject matter. For example, her talking about doing homework naked and him asking "for his friend Jordan" if she likes guys who wear women's underwear, which is actually something we enjoy together. (And when she said she thought it was gross he agreed—what a turd!) Now that I am pregnant, I am feeling like the stakes are even higher and finding these messages has me questioning if I can accept this blurring of boundaries as my husband's price of admission. Should I just write this off as my husband being pathetic or should I confront him? This seems like a very slippery slope to me but my husband probably won't see it that way. I could wrap my head around forgiveness for cheating if we had been together for over a decade, but if it were to happen only two years in, we would be done.

I'm trying really hard not to be crazy pregnant lady, but please feel free to set me straight if I am.

Hopefully Not A Crazy Pregnant Lady

I think it's possible for a married person in a closed relationship—or a long-partnered person in the same—to innocently flirt with a friend, a coworker, or a stranger. Ideally the married/partnered person plows the erotic charge they derived from that flirtation into their primary partner when they get home. I would go so far as to say that it's advisable for married/long-partnered persons to allow for flirtation with others, so long as its occasional and innocent, because the ego boost of being found attractive by someone who isn't required to find you attractive can redound to the benefit of both spouses/partners and make a marriage/relationship stronger.

But the operative word here is "innocent." It's one thing to flirt with someone—a vague and general flirtation, a vague and general acknowledgement of mutual attraction—but it's another to suss someone out in detail. When your husband asked his friend whether she found men in women's underwear attractive he crossed the line from innocent flirtation to actionable intelligence. Maybe he just wanted to privately enjoy a very specific masturbatory fantasy featuring his 22-year-old coworker and the stuff he likes best—wearing women's underwear—but the fact that he immediately agreed it was gross when she shot him down is a bad sign. It would be less concerning if after she said "gross!" he said something like, "Actually, my wife and I get into." That would sound like flirty friends swapping details about their sex lives. His immediate and, yes, turdish disavowal of his thing for women's underwear, however, leads me to believe that at the very least he wanted to preserve the potential for some IRL encounter down the road. He didn't want her to rule him out as a potential sex partner, he didn't want to disqualify himself.

Confront away, HNACPL, with my blessing.