Help! I'm in Love with a Coworker! [Part 1, NSFW]
Help! I'm in Love with a Coworker! [Part 1, NSFW]
Mistakes were made. By me. I'm a recovering office romance-aholic. This is my cautionary tale.
Are you overworked and underpaid at the office?
Is your marriage stale and your partner unappreciative?
Do you want to bring some zing into your dull, gray life?Then ask your doctor about having an office romance! Engaging in a secret affair at work has been unscientifically proven to improve morale, boost productivity, repair shattered self-esteem, and inflate one’s ego like the Hindenburg. Falling in love with a coworker adds strife to your life and turmoil to your mortal coil — and don’t you deserve to feel alive again? There’s nothing like a titillating drama to tickle your ovaries or impart an angle to your dangle!
Dating a coworker is not for everyone. Side effects may include: divorce, unemployment, office drama, damaged trust, reputational harm, sexual harassment lawsuits, allegations of favoritism, and setting your kids up for failure. Ask your doctor today if dating a coworker is right for you!
There are many valid reasons for pursuing a workplace romance with a colleague. If you believe that mixing your work life with your love life is worth the risk of blowing both of them up, then check out these articles from Bloomberg, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review. They’ve written how-to guides on dating a coworker, and we have nothing to add.
On the other hand, if you:
Are undecided,
Have resolved to keep your career and relationships out of the Straits of Conflicting Interests,
Are trapped between a rock and a hard place (where the rock is your commitment to your partner and the hard place describes your erogenous zones when you think about your coworker),
Then this essay is for you.
Confessions of a Convalescent Colleague-philiac
Primary author of Adventures in Leadership Land here. When I was a younger man, I had once had an emotional affair with a subordinate that came within inches of a physical affair. I’ve flirted with (and sometimes developed crushes on) coworkers and bosses. What saved me from home-wrecking, venereal diseases, and illegitimate children1 was not my supreme morals or strength of will. I simply wasn’t handsome enough to be a successful womanizer. Thanks for beating me just enough with the genetic ugly stick, mom and dad!
Many armchair psychiatrists would blame “mommy and daddy issues” for my constant craving for social acceptance. In my younger days, I tried to fill that hole in my soul with the attention of beautiful women (spoiler alert: it didn’t work). Nowadays, I attention-whore to heal that score in my core by writing this blog for internet strangers (spoiler alert: it’s still not working).
I’m not proud to have an insatiable hunger for external validation…but since I’m stuck with it, I might as well do something constructive with it, right? It’s like getting to the final step of Alcoholics Anonymous or any 12-step program, where the first 11 steps get you sober, while the 12th step keeps you sober by encouraging you to help other people get through the first 11 steps.
As a fully-fledged member of Office Romance-aholics Anonymous, this essay is my attempt to help you through the first 11 steps. Not only do I want this essay to get you out of the Straits of Conflicting Interests, but I also hope that it keeps me out of the Straits by preventing a relapse into old habits.
Final note: even though these autobiographical vignettes come from the perspective of a straight male, the lessons learned should still be applicable to women, non-binary people, and Martians of any sexual orientation.
Falling In Love Down the Slippery Slope, Head Over Heels
Good judgment is the result of experience.
Experience is the result of bad judgment.
To an external observer, my “bad judgment” boils down to ignoring the head on my shoulders and listening to the one between my legs. But even when my brain was in control, fantasies and fallacies would frequently bubble up from my subconscious and pollute my judgment. Let’s investigate some of those corrupting influences:
Libido disguised as curiosity
A genuine sense of curiosity helps me connect with people. Instead of talking about me, me, me, I ask about them, them, them. People enjoy talking about the things that interest them, and they gradually associate those positive feelings with me! Curiosity is great for developing platonic and professional relationships, but it led me into the Straits of Conflicting Interests when I was already committed to someone else.
When curiosity grows metastasizes into a crush, it’s difficult to tell where the curiosity ends and the crush begins. This fuzzy boundary allowed me to plausibly deny that I was becoming smitten. I always had an excuse to downplay my attraction to a coworker as innocent curiosity. Like the metaphorical frog in the pot, I didn’t notice the temperature rising slowly until I was too hot and bothered to get out.
Lying to myself about motivations
As the curiosity defense became increasingly untenable, I fabricated other self-deceptions. For example: “I was trying to be a good mentor” and “I want to be a better boss to my subordinates/a better subordinate for my boss.” One lie takes the gold medal for mental gymnastics: “I’m uplifting female colleagues by fighting against the double standards that Sheryl Sandberg wrote about in Lean In.” Never mind that I was doing the exact opposite by prizing the pretty face over merit.
All these desires were genuine, but they were paper-thin cover stories to disguise my underlying motivation: to impress attractive women. To make myself whole by filling the hole in my soul.
The cloak of shame
How could I possibly convince myself that my selfish desires were altruistic?
During every post-mortem analysis, with the clarity of hindsight, I asked myself: what the hell was I thinking?! The answer: I wasn’t. I was feeling. My brain handed down the laws, and my heart broke them. Shame was the culprit, and cowardice was its accomplice.
Shame inhibited me from admitting that I’d taken my collegial relationships too far. If I had admitted that my behavior was unacceptable, shame would have lambasted me for being a bad boyfriend. A wayward husband. An unprofessional colleague. A lascivious bosshole. The shame was too much to bear, so I took the coward’s way out: I hid behind the comfortable illusion that I was doing the right things, as prescribed by the leaders that came before me. I told myself that I was striving to be a leader, not a manager. I tried desperately to maintain my self-identity as a good person with good intentions.
Shame is like an invisibility cloak. Throw the cloak of shame over something, and it appears distorted (if it remains visible at all). We whisper about the shameful things that we should be yelling about. Or worse: we bury them deep inside the Taboo Tunnels, pretend like they don’t exist, and let them fester. When we want to save face with other people, we lie to them. When we want to protect our self-esteem, we lie to ourselves.
And boy, did I lie to myself.
If you look at the subterranean layout of Leadership Land, you’ll see two large Taboo Tunnels that connect Liar’s Lair to the Straits of Conflicting Interests and the Desert of Good Intentions. The Taboo Tunnels and Liar’s Lair reeks of shame.
Starry-eyedealism
If the saddest words of tongue or pen are “it could have been,” then the words most likely to produce excessive optimism are “what it could be.”
We all put on masks of professionalism before we step into the office. These masks restrain our worst impulses, like resisting the urge to fart “B-O-R-I-N-G” in Morse code to interrupt someone’s PowerPoint presentation. Our masks of professionalism absorb traits from other people’s behavior, like using corporate buzzwords we’d never utter in our personal lives. We tell many leadership lies to keep the peace. We abandon our true selves at the Altar of Professional Conduct in favor of benign disingenuity.
Whenever I fell in love with a coworker, I failed to recognize that I was in love with her mask of professionalism, rather than the person behind the mask. I mistook her sanitized and cherry-picked behavior as a reflection of her true character. This error in judgment caused me to idealize my office crushes. You know the “hopeless romantic” stock character who goes on a first date and immediately starts daydreaming about our lives together2?
That was me.
Deceived by the rose-tinted lens of excessive optimism, I disregarded red flag after red flag until I could no longer ignore the communist parade marching by. It took me years of repeating my mistakes, but I finally learned that every time I became attracted to a coworker:
There was a stranger behind the mask of professionalism.
Confirmation bias fed my fantasies. I felt excited by superficial similarities and eagerly searched for further evidence that we were compatible. Meanwhile, I was blissfully (willfully?) ignorant of the many dealbreakers that lurked beneath the surface.
When those dealbreakers finally emerged, the heady optimism of “what it could be” flipped like a light switch into the disillusionment of “what could have been.” This abrupt reversal often damaged our professional relationship.
In short: I was a sucker for the obvious and visible. I was a Thanksgiving turkey whose daily observations led me further and further away from the truth…until the truth came around to kick me in the head.
Both of them.
Building Terraces on the Slippery Slope
My attraction to coworkers was the most dangerous kind of opponent: when it wasn’t overwhelming me with brute force, it was whispering in my ear and corrupting my judgment. How do you fight against an opponent that can take by guile what it can’t by strength? That will be the topic in the next article.
As I wrote this post, the word count stretched past 3,500. The first step to any 12-step program is to admit you have a problem, and I’m admitting I talk too much.
So I split this article in half, King Solomon-style. Here’s where we are in this article series:
Lookism: Why Does Beauty Discrimination Still Exist? was originally part 1 of 3, but I re-branded it as a standalone post.
How to Accidentally Fall in Love with a Coworker was originally part 2 of 3, but is now also a standalone post. It’s the spiritual predecessor to this essay.
This post was originally supposed to be part 3 of 3, but it’s now the first part of a two-part essay.
Since part 2 is already mostly written, you should see it sooner rather than later!
Cynical view: life itself is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate.
Idealization also happens on first dates, when both people are on their best behavior. You know when else people are on their best behavior? On professional first dates – that is, during interviews. In the Interview Mountains, we also run the risk of idealizing a job candidate’s visible traits while discounting their invisible flaws.