My boyfriend is a software developer/data scientist who recently got an opportunity to build a highly secure software for a government. This opportunity came through some friends of his out of nowhere and at that time, we had no idea how important it could get. He set up a new business and started working on it about 6 months ago. I don’t work in IT, so I couldn’t help him with the main part, but I was there the whole time, supporting him and helping with admin work and accounting.

Fast forward recently, about 1 month ago, the software was launched and the government officials were extremely happy with it. They decided to fly my boyfriend to another city so they could have a face-to-face meeting and potentially discuss other future contracts. During the meeting, they asked my boyfriend who else was on his team and he mentioned that he worked on the software alone, with only his girlfriend helping him with the financial and admin part of the business. The main guy (the government official) then mentioned that he would like a second (less formal) meeting and insisted on me being there as well.

This week we had that meeting. At the beginning the meeting was going well: we were talking about our business, potential future developments to the software and maybe them expanding the use of it to other institutions. However, as the meeting progressed, the guy (the government official) was a bit “overly friendly”. He would ask me very personal questions, stare at me weirdly and occasionally touch my arm. He also kept making comments towards my boyfriend that weren’t exactly appropriate like “You have to work hard to keep this kind of woman next to you. There are plenty of men who would want to steal her.”. I brushed it off as “maybe it’s this person’s personality” or “maybe that’s their culture” (I’m Eastern-European and I know we tend to be more distant than others).

However, at the end of our meeting the guy mentioned that he would like another meeting with me alone to ensure that our partnership could progress. I was very surprised by this. I told him that I had no technical knowledge and I wasn’t the brain of the business. In fact, I was just part-time helping my boyfriend with tasks that he didn’t have time for. The guy was very persistent and refused to accept another meeting with both of us. We left, telling him that we would get back to him the next week.

After we left, I told my boyfriend that I refuse to go anywhere alone with that guy and that there is absolutely no explanation for why he would need to speak to me in private. My boyfriend then got upset and keeps begging me to do it, as this could become huge for his business. He keeps saying that me refusing to spend 1 hour of my time could sabotage his entire work. AITA for thinking this might be an inappropriate situation and not wanting to do it?