You are spot on! It is so weird how women have the reputation for being gossips but in my experience in workplaces with mostly men, men are the gossipiest of gossips.

What you wrote about "his wife may have found herself to be suspicious" made me think through how she felt about how much her husband and I talked over the years--probably...2-3 hours a week for 20 years. I feel a bit bad that I haven't considered that before, so thank you for prompting me to think about that. I imagine it...was reassuring to her when he'd tell her some of what he and I discussed, that she was in the loop, that we were just talking about all the stupid minutia of life or some guy I had a crush on. I guess to me it was such a gimme that he was just a friend, but I could have done a better job of reassuring her of that over the years. I also...could have reassured her that he RARELY talked about her or his marriage to me to respect her privacy, so she wouldn't worry that he was confiding secrets about her to me. Hm. Things we think of that we wished we'd thought of sooner...