Office Romances - Find Love and Romance at Work
How to Use The Workplace Dating Pool to Find a Partner
Sep 19, 2009
In their book Office Mate: Your Employee Handbook for Romance on the Job authors Stephanie Losee and Helaine Olen outlined the advantages of the workplace for meeting up with a potential partner. In the past, people paired up in a community where singles had the luxury of time to get to know one another. Now people, particularly those that move away to college and then again in search of work may not have this background.
Many modern approaches to dating emphasise looks and style and demand a quick decision about investing more time in a possible pairing, trying to pattern-match one's ideal partner template in the space of a few minutes. Speed dating is all about first impressions and the initial spark, and dating agencies often demand a lot of self knowledge of their clients. There is little room for serendipity in finding a match that works, though it may not have been one's archetypal image of Mr./Mrs. Right
The Workplace as a Dating Pool
Curiously enough, the workplace does share many characteristics with the communities of old. People are in a reasonably stable grouping, and there is plenty of time to observe one's co-workers both under pressure of work, meeting challenges, and also when they let their hair down on after-work social events or Friday evening drinks.
For all that, looking for love at work is a topic frequently derided in popular culture, with many TV shows and movies showing the hazards of office romances. The downsides make good screenplay, of course – not only is there the risk of a broken heart, but also the risks of losing a career along with the romance. For all that, several studies cited by the authors of Office Mate indicated that more than half of office workers had had some sort of romantic liaison with someone else at work at one time or another. There are numerous success stories – Microsoft founder Bill Gates met his wife Melinda French while she was a product manager for Microsoft.
Some Dos and Don'ts or Looking For Love at the Office
The pros of finding romance among one's co-workers are mainly about the greater knowledge partners can have about each other, with plenty of time to size each other up. However, because work is of course about earning a living, the boundaries have to be respected. Some of the common dos and don'ts of office romances include
- Make sure that common interests cover more than just work.
- Socialise off company premises.
- Accept no for an answer gracefully and with dignity.
- Don't use company email for personal messages to a paramour – ever. It is too easy to give a hostage to fortune that way, and may email policies forbid it anyway. Google Claire Swire for more reasons why.
- Relationships between a boss and someone in their line are always complex, and at the earliest opportunity the senior partner should contact their line management so that they are not responsible for managing a romantic partner, with all the conflicts of interests that implies. Most companies have policies about how relationships between superiors and direct reports should be managed, which usually involve moving one of the partners so they are not in a direct reporting chain.
Finding Love at Work - Summary
The workplace is also a community, so it offers the dating pool of a community. However, it is firstly a workplace, so despite the unique advantages there are some hazards to office dating which need to be mitigated, to avoid falling into the traps stereotyped in TV sitcoms. A lot of people have formed a romantic relationship at work sometime – the studies cited in Office Mate indicate just under a half of office workers have been romantically involved with a co-worker at some time in their careers.
Sources
Losee, Stephanie and Olen, Helaine. Office Mate, Cincinnati OH: Adams Media, 2007, ISBN:9781598693300
Melinda Gates Goes Public, CNN, 2008
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