How to Accidentally Fall in Love with a Coworker [NSFW]

That feeling when you try to build trust with a colleague and end up sleeping with them instead

When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near.
— Frank Sinatra

How much time do you spend with your co-workers compared to time with your spouse/partner?

Every week, you receive a direct deposit of 168 hours into your time account. You spend ~50 hours sleeping, thereby paying your brain’s electricity bills and keeping the lights on. This leaves 118 waking hours in your time account.

A full-time job (40 hours in the US) accounts for at least one-third of your waking hours. If you’re a high-level white-collar professional, or you hold more than one job, you can easily put in 50+ hours per week. This leaves only 68 hours per week that (supposedly) belong to you.

Now consider the time you spend commuting. Grocery shopping. Chauffeuring your kids to and from their maximum-security daycare. On chores. On exercise. On entertainment and solitary “me-time.” Do you spend 20 hours per week? 30?

After accounting for your 168 hours, you might be appalled at how little time you spend with your pair-bonded partner; there’s a good chance you spend more time with your colleagues! This gives you ample opportunity to fall in love with a coworker.

“Should I reach out to your low-hanging fruit, or do you have the bandwidth to move the needle? Let’s take this offline so you can do a deep dive in my office later.”

Unspoken Attraction Between Coworkers: How Prevalent Is It?

Welcome back to the Taboo Tunnels! When we’re at work, we don’t talk about our attraction (or revulsion) to coworkers. Instead, we maintain the polite fiction that we leave our libidos at home. To speak the unfiltered truth is “unprofessional.”

We know that there exists an unspoken attraction between colleagues, but the attraction is difficult to measure. Imagine a bunch of researchers in white lab coats walking around your workplace with clipboards, asking “Do you think Larry from accounting is hot or not?” Even if you took the researchers seriously and answered honestly, Larry probably looked better on the day he accepted his Most Innovative Employee award (when he donned a tailored suit) than the morning after the award ceremony (when he woke up hung over in a drainage ditch). Whether you rate Larry a 3/10 or a 10/10 depends on when you last saw him.

Instead of asking people what they think, let’s look at what they actually do:

• Forbes commissioned a survey which claimed that over half of respondents have boinked a colleague. In this other survey commissioned by a sex shop, 10% of respondents admitted to sleeping with their bosses¹. These surveys seem to imply that adult employees are actually horny teenagers who hide their lust behind a mask of professionalism. That’s not wholly inaccurate, but perhaps a more charitable interpretation is that everyone suffers moments of weakness in a 40-year career – and sometimes those moments coincide with temptation.

• There are thousands of Google searches per month in the United States related to dating a coworker, attraction between coworkers, etc.

Google only gives an order of magnitude for each search term, so the average number of monthly hits for “dating a coworker” and “attracted to coworker” could be anywhere from 1,000 to 9,999 or 100 to 999, respectively.

• Google trends shows almost consistent interest in these search terms over the past ten years. There was a decline from March 2020 through May 2021, presumably because it’s more difficult to lust after coworkers when everyone was stuck in their COVID-19 quarantine bubbles.

But now everyone’s going back to the office to resume ogling, leering at, and sexually harassing each other! Whoop-dee-doo.

If you’ve never witnessed an office romance, it’s easy to conclude that attraction to coworkers is rare, and that sexual harassment lawsuits only happen to other people. Our brains come preloaded with an availability heuristic that makes:

• Spoken things seem more common than they really are, and

• Unspoken things seem rarer than they really are.

Because of this psychological shortcut, silence is deafening in the Taboo Tunnels.

To illustrate, let’s look at a different taboo: incest. You probably don’t know anyone who’s a product of incest, so it’s easy to believe that incest is incredibly rare. Like, one-in-a-million rarity. In truth, genetic tests like AncestryDNA and 23andMe have shown that incest is far more common than we previously allowed ourselves to believe. Do you know that every single one of the people you’ve ever met is not the product of incest? Or do you only know that you don’t know, because you’ve never asked?

In a similar vein, the Forbes/sex shop surveys and Google search data suggest that unspoken attraction between coworkers is far more common than we’d like to believe. Every eight minutes (on average), someone in the United States prays to the Google Gods to seek answers related to dating a coworker. And that’s not even counting the people who turn to YouTube. Reddit. TikTok (shudder). Friends and family. “Dear Abby” advice columns.

And we’ll never hear from those who kiss and don’t tell – the legions of closed-lipped lovers who keep their secret passions close to their hearts.

All of this is to say: office romances and sexual harassment allegations are not things that only happen to other people. In fact, since you’re reading Adventures in Leadership Land, you’re at a greater risk of falling in love with a coworker or boss than the average worker. That’s because you’re spending some of your 168 hours looking for ways to hone your leadership skills, and…

Better Leaders are Attractive Leaders

Ten years ago, the New York Times published an article titled “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This.” This article went viral, and for good reason – it outlandishly claimed that you could fall in love with a stranger by completing a questionnaire, then having a 4-minute staring contest. The psychologist Arthur Aron devised the method back in 1997, and it apparently worked so well that one pair of his test subjects started as strangers, then got married within six months!

Falling in love with anyone – that is, generating affection out of thin air – is a powerful ability, and with great power comes great responsibility. The New York Times author recounted how she successfully seduced an acquaintance with Aron’s fall-in-love method, but she didn’t write about how dangerous this superpower can be. What if you don’t want to fall in love with someone? You’d have to avoid brewing this love potion if you’re already in a monogamous relationship. You’d also have to ban the introduction of aphrodisiacs from your workplace.

…but you shouldn’t. Unfortunately, being an effective leader requires you to use a build-rapport-with-anyone method which is very similar to Arthur Aron’s fall-in-love-with-anyone method:

1. Sit down with your new team, to whom you are a stranger. The Aron study preferentially paired men and women together, but you’ll get an assortment of people on your team. Some of whom could be attractive members of your preferred sex.

2. Build trust by revealing a small vulnerability and inviting your subordinates to share theirs in return. We previously wrote that building trust requires vulnerability, not just expectations and credibility. This trust-building method mirrors Arthur Aron’s fall-in-love method where two strangers ask each other a set of 36 increasingly intimate questions, progressively revealing deeper personal secrets to each other.

3. Make eye contact to show engagement. Eye contact keeps listeners engaged while you speak and demonstrates that you’re listening when it’s their turn to talk. The fall-in-love method supposedly concludes with the two strangers gazing silently into each other’s eyes for exactly four minutes,² which is guaranteed to unnerve your colleagues and possibly result in harassment allegations and/or involuntary commitment to the nearest psych ward. Nevertheless, prolonged (but not excessive) eye contact allows you to peer into the window of your interlocutor’s soul, and to progressively deepen your relationship with them.

The “build rapport quick” and “fall in love fast” methods share common elements, like building intimacy by progressive self-disclosure, mutual vulnerability, and steady eye contact. If you become adept at these soft skills, you’ll quickly win friends and influence people – at the risk of embroiling yourself in workplace drama by building too much intimacy. Unless you set clear boundaries, you can accidentally turn professional relationships into romantic ones. You can find yourself falling in love with a colleague, boss, or subordinate (or find them falling for you) even though neither person had any intention of seducing the other.

Welcome to the dark side of good leadership. You did everything right, but you still wandered into the Desert of Good Intentions. Your training seminars, business school, and self-help books taught you the superpower of trust-building, but they didn’t teach you how to use it responsibly, did they?³

Case Study: Larry’s Love Triangle

The rumor mill at Company McCorporateface, Inc. has been hyperactive lately. Larry from accounting has been making googly-goo eyes at:

• Lauren, who’s the same rank as Larry, from the marketing department

• Lindsey, a fellow accountant on Larry’s team, also the same rank

• Lucy, his boss

All else being equal, which of the three women is most susceptible to bewitchment by Larry’s pelvic sorcery?

Larry from accounting (AKA “Larry the lecher”) is fond of innuendo-laced corporate buzzwords, like “it’s noon o’clock and I have a hard stop. I’ll circle back tomorrow to drill down into the weeds with you.”

Most people’s first guess would be Lauren. There are few (if any) Company restrictions on Lauren and Larry’s burgeoning courtship because they’re both the same rank and work in separate organizational silos. Furthermore, most people have only observed workplace romances that involve partners who don’t work together⁴, so this automatically seems like the most common type.

Appearances can be deceiving.

Larry and Lauren don’t have any legitimate reasons to work together, so they could only develop their relationship outside of work hours. In contrast, Larry has daily opportunities to share vulnerabilities with his teammate Lindsey. He spends many hours peering into Lindsey’s ocean-colored eyes during their discussions, and she finds his smoldering gaze more interesting than meeting agendas or accounts receivable or depreciation methods.

Company McCorporateface, Inc. has hundreds of employees. By looking beyond the half-dozen people on his team, Larry has more chance encounters with people who may be his “type” (like Lauren). But a large, shallow pool of date-able coworkers is no replacement for deepening a relationship with one specific person. Lindsey’s proximity on the org chart gives Larry more legitimate reasons to spend time with her, and to practice the build-rapport-quick/fall-in-love-fast methods from the previous section. Even if Lindsey isn’t ordinarily Larry’s “type,” they could still fall for each other simply because they spend so many of their 168 hours together. It’s best not to assume that the most visible office romances are the most common; secret passions abound in the darkness of the Taboo Tunnels.

What about Larry and Lucy, his boss? Hold on to your reproductive anatomy, because we’re going even deeper into the Taboo Tunnels. Things become even more uncomfortably titillating when you mix power differentials into an unspoken attraction between coworkers.

Power Differentials → Sexual Tension

Let’s run through the fall-in-love-fast checklist. Do Larry and Lucy have legitimate reasons to:

1. Spend plenty of time together? Check ✔️

2. Share vulnerabilities with each other? Check ✔️

3. Make lots of eye contact? Check ✔️

Larry has as many opportunities to build intimacy with his boss as he does with his teammates! On top of that, the power dynamic between superior and subordinate is like a seasoning for workplace relationships. A sprinkle of power differential won’t make an unpalatable relationship palatable (only alcohol can do that), but it might turn a platonic workplace relationship into a spicy one.

We aren’t aware of any research that asks workers “would you rather sleep with your same-rank coworker, your boss, or your direct subordinate?” So, we resorted to another data source: pornographic websites.

If one’s eyes are the window to their soul, then one’s porn habits are the window to their deepest, dirtiest fantasies. We figured that the number of pornographic videos containing terms such as “boss” would be a decent estimate of how often people fantasize about having sex with their bosses or subordinates.

Here are the results of our, uh, “research.”

Pornhub publishes the most popular search terms annually in their “Year in Review” blog posts. We included popular-but-irrelevant terms like “MILF” and “stepmom” for easy comparison against search terms related to power differentials and employment.

These numbers show that a significant minority of porn viewers fantasize about boinking their bosses and secretaries⁵. Some other observations:

• “Office” frequently appeared in conjunction with other search terms. That’s because an office is a fantasy setting, while the other search terms are roles to be played out in that setting.

• Porn videos with the keyword “boss” (implicit power differential) were far more common than videos containing generic terms like “coworker” (no power differential).

• We didn’t originally search for “secretary”, but the keyword kept popping up in the search suggestions. Clearly, a lot of men lust after their secretaries! This is reflected in this nifty Bloomberg visualization, which shows a trend of male middle managers and CEOs marrying female secretaries.

From these numbers, we speculate that:

A power differential can intensify an existing attraction between superior and subordinate.

Remember: a power differential is a spice. It won’t rescue an unpalatable dish, but it sometimes enhances a bland one. You will experience many reporting relationships over the course of a 40-year career, and you’ll be responsible for more relationships from lower in the hierarchy. Many reporting relationships will be completely unaffected by power differentials. Some reporting relationships may experience sexual tension for years, with the boss’s authority contributing a weak aphrodisiac effect. And the rest?

…don’t be surprised if you walk in on a middle manager drilling down into the weeds with his secretary.

A Victim of Your Own Success

Great leaders are willing to do what others won’t today, so they can do what others can’t tomorrow.

If you spend much of your 168 hours per week reading books about leadership, emulating your role models, and running toward explosions while everyone else is fleeing, then you are exceptional. You’re the one with the secret sauce to get things done. You’re the one who actually gets 20 years of experience, rather than one year of experience 20 times. You’re the one who can swallow two dozen frogs and run eleven miles first thing in the morning before showing up at the office. You’re the one who gets promoted closer and closer to the top of Executive Mountain.

All this makes you more attractive, for better or worse. On the plus side, you’ll attract great people to your team. But once you start spending 40-55+ hours per week (one-third to one-half of your 118 waking hours!) with great people, you run the risk of attracting someone “great” enough to obliterate your 20-year marriage with a 20-minute tryst. Someone “great” enough to overwhelm your inhibitions and send you both tail-spinning into the Career Swamp.

If you’re already attracted to a coworker, or you see signs that a coworker is attracted to you, or you have some Larry’s & Lucy’s under your command and suspect they’re “checking in” a little too intimately, don’t panic! The next essay is called Help! I’m in Love with a Coworker! and comes in two parts. Click here to read part 1.

1. The sample sizes are large (2,000 respondents for each survey) and the administrator, OnePoll, claims to adhere to the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s guidelines. However, we’re skeptical of the survey results because:

1. These surveys ask the kind of scandalous, intrusive questions that encourage people to turn red-faced, sputter indignantly, and then lie, embellish, downplay, or divulge half-truths.

2. Following industry standards is another way of saying “we did the bare minimum we could get away with.”

3. If OnePoll conducts their surveys with the same rigor as peer-reviewed psychological research, then they rely on convenience sampling and their results are not representative of the general population. It’s the same problem of psychology professors who experiment on local undergraduates and generalize the results to the broader population.

2. The New York Times article portrayed the four-minute staring contest as being part of Arthur Aron’s original fall-in-love methodology. It is not. We couldn’t figure out where the NYT author got the idea to gaze dreamily into someone’s eye sockets for four minutes. Maybe from somewhere else in Dr. Aron’s corpus of research?

3. Sometimes there’s an ethics module included near the end of the training program, clearly as an afterthought. Most provide generic “don’t be a jerk” guidance that repeats the indoctrination you suffered in elementary school, but expressed with bigger, professional-sounding buzzwords. Some unusually good ethics courses explore the gray area between right and wrong. We haven’t experienced any ethics training with a theme of “we just taught you how to wield greater influence; now we’ll teach you how to use that power responsibly.”

4. We sometimes see spouses recruited together as a “package deal” if one of them has rare skills, or if the employer is filling a vacancy in a talent desert (or literal desert). Other times, we see one spouse join and the other follows later. Outside of tiny startups, we’ve never seen a case where spouses were placed in a reporting relationship – which is a good practice. What if they divorce? What if the work requires them to place the employer’s interests above their relationship? Keeping spouses separated into silos helps keep them out of the Straits of Conflicting Interests.

5. Two caveats about the porno search results:

1. Multiple search terms can appear in a single video title, which leads to that video being double- or triple-counted across searches. For example, a MILF could also be a boss, and a lesbian video could also involve two secretaries and a manager in an office setting.

2. Because of caveat #1, the numbers of porn video results are only useful as rough measures of relative interest (e.g. the popularity of “boss” compared to “employee”), not absolute interest.