Love affair at work. Why you shouldn’t have a relationship at work

According to HH.ru, an office romance took place in the lives of 41% of employees. Moreover, one in five led to marriage. It turns out that work is a good place to find your life partner, despite the fact that employers are usually against intrigues, and work colleagues can start gossiping behind their backs. asked psychodramatist Olga Malinina about the pitfalls of falling in love in the workplace, so that lovers can foresee everything in advance.

Why do romances happen during working hours?

Where else can you find partners? If we sleep eight hours, work eight hours, spend two hours on the road, and we also need to run to the gym, cook dinner, do laundry, clean up. According to VTsIOM, work is the second most popular place where people find their mate. There they spend a third of their time in the company of other people. Plus, the modern corporate culture is aimed at making people feel at home, communicate, open up, create a “family” and direct joint efforts towards a common cause. Constant interaction, pastime and joint problem solving is a good platform for building relationships. If there is some kind of sympathy between people, then it intensifies and breaks through.

Benefits of an office romance

In addition to being convenient and not having to set aside extra time for dates, falling in love can develop into a serious, strong relationship. A man and a woman can create a family, give birth to children.

If you remember yourself or another at the initial stage of falling in love, then the person is transformed. He tries to look good, wants to show his best side, is ready to spend more time in the office in order to meet with the object of his sympathy more often. Efficiency increases. If both are involved in common projects, then lovers pay more attention to them. Such activity, as a rule, leads to career advancement, because the energy that has appeared is directed not only to the chosen one, but also to work. Even if the feeling of falling in love does not turn into a relationship, but remains inside one person, the fact that he can still experience such feelings fills, gives strength and manifests itself in increased working capacity.

Cons of office romance

Even though work is a good place to meet your love, don’t ignore the pitfalls that can ruin everything.

Like it or not, few people manage to separate work and non-work relationships. One way or another, each of us has different qualities that manifest themselves in the process of long-term communication. We reveal ourselves from different sides, including not the best. Any quarrels, conflicts can leak or happen in front of colleagues, which does not exclude gossip and conversations behind their backs. If relationships are established between unequal employees, a leader and a subordinate, then there may be an attempt to use each other – both in one direction and in the other. Such a story, as a rule, negatively affects the entire team, because the boss has a pet, and everyone else feels unsafe and fears that now everyone is reporting about them or, conversely, hiding some information. This state of affairs is aggravated if the couple does not advertise their relationship. At first, this has a bad effect on working relationships, and then undermines personal ones.

Do not exclude from time to time a pop-up doubt: “Why did you choose me? Are you interested in me as a person or do you want to learn more about the company’s plans and achieve career growth? An office romance is like a mother-teacher and a child in the same school. Everyone has suspicions that something is unclean here.

“Unequal marriage

According to statistics, some novels last only four months. It is not known what is behind such a short relationship, but you can try to suggest that this is an excessive idealization of a partner. A person who has some power always looks more attractive. You can fall in love with a status, not a person. In general, during the period of falling in love, people tend to idealize and endow the other with some special qualities. A leadership position or broader powers provide good ground for this. A person may indeed have status, authority, power or specific skills, but this has nothing to do with his moral qualities or superpowers. If idealization occurs, then after a while, when the lovers get to know each other better, they, as a rule, are disappointed: the mask thrown over the person falls off, and a real ordinary person becomes visible from under it. Either the “less talented” catches up or even surpasses his “god-like” lover. The veil of power and authority leaves, disappointment occurs, and the relationship falls apart.

The boss can also be fascinated: for example, his subordinate looks at him as if he were a celestial who has something special. He joins this game, but over time, when constant admiration gets boring, a person notices that, apart from the ability to admire, there is nothing else in a person.

How to survive a breakup without losing your job?

Perhaps the most painful thing in such novels is parting. It is difficult to part with a person as with a loved one, but continue to see each other every day as with a work colleague. If there has been a break in relations and there is no way to change jobs, then it is important to try to communicate with the former only about work issues. Do not seek or support other topics for communication. Don’t talk about your personal life and don’t ask about your ex’s personal life. If one of the colleagues knows about the relationship, do not give an extra reason for gossip and avoid any proposals and meetings that are not directly related to work. At least until the feeling of resentment subsides. In such a situation, the ideal option is to quit and find a new job, because past relationships will still influence. Don’t expect objectivity from yourself. If someone claims that he can easily separate feelings from work and not mix contexts, then he is deceiving himself.

If you still stay to work together, then it is worth attracting someone else: so that a neutral person can look from the outside and evaluate the objectivity of opinions.

This is not to say that an office romance is definitely bad. He has his own risks, up to losing his job, but there is also the opportunity to find his life partner. Most often, we fall in love with those who are close to us. After all, we cannot control our feelings and forbid ourselves to fall in love with colleagues during working hours. But a person is able to control his actions and try to get around all the pitfalls with minimal losses for himself and his chosen one.