First off, som context. My friend (M24) and I (M24) work in the same area, but different companies. This leads to us "spotting" each other from time to time. The most common way one of us gets "spotted" is while on a street that can be seen from the others office window. Anyway, the first time I spotted my friend through the window I took a picture of him and sent to our friendgroups Snapchat-group. This started a tradition of us sending a snap of the other everytime we see them "in the wild".
With that out of the way, this is the situation. Yesterday me and my colleague (F25), let's call her J, had lunch at a lunch cafe near our office. Our team (6 people) go to this cafe every Wednesday, it's become a tradition. However, yesterday we were the only ones at the office (combination of remote work, sickness and meetings) so we were the only ones at the cafe. My friend happened to walk by, saw us through the window and sent a snap to our group.
When I came home my GF (F24) immediately asked who the girl in the picture was. She sounded upset. I told her it was J from work and that we were out for lunch. I also told her that we usually go this place on Wednesdays with the entire team but this day it just happened to be only me and J at the office.
My GF thought it through and basically told me: "Okay, I trust you. But in the future could you refrain from going out for lunch if it's only you and a female colleague?". (This is somewhat paraphrased).
I was a bit taken aback by this. My GF has never before shown jealousy in this way, I guess she hasn't really needed to. Just to make sure I asked her why and she told me "it's just weird, you know?". To which I said that I don't know. I don't think it's weird. To me it's more weird that she thinks it's "weird". I asked her if she would mind if I had lunch alone with my other colleague (M22). "No, that's okay. It's not the same." I then asked her if she was okay with me grabbing lunch with my childhood friend (F24). "Of course. She has a boyfriend and you've know her for ages". This made me feel even more conflicted as she aknowledges that I can hang out alone with a woman with it being non-romantic, yet she doesn't want me to do that (with my childhood friend being the exception).
After discussing this for about an hour I just told her: "I won't avoid hanging out with someone just because she's a woman, and I think expecting that from me is unreasonable." (Again, somewhat paraphrased).
This made her angry. She more or less told me that it's 1) not unreasonable, it's just common sense and 2) that me not respecting her boundaries tells her that I don't respect her enough to show basic human decency. We ended up agreeing to disagree and discuss this again at a later point, then went on to order take away and watch Netflix for the rest of the day.
For extra context: we've been together for almost 4 years, we live together and she has never shown any signs of jealousy before at all.
While I am curious what other think about the subject matter (hanging out 1 on 1 with some of the opposite gender), this is not an AITA post and that is not why I'm writing this. What I want advise on is how to handle a situation like this. I want to respect my GFs boundaries but in this case I just don't think it's reasonable, but I don't know how to "argue" that without coming off as disrespectful or selfish.
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