Is meeting under the mistletoe worth the grief?
Sarah and Josh, work colleagues at an Ontario telecommunications company, had always been flirty, but Sarah knew that the heat was on when they started sharing breaks together. Soon, Josh was finding reasons to stop by Sarah's desk three times a day and the two were corralling co-workers for after-hours drinks. One Friday night, after everyone else had left the bar, Josh pulled Sarah close and kissed her. They officially became a couple and vowed to keep their increasingly serious romance out of the office.
Then, after almost a year together, Josh struck up an intense friendship with Crystal, one of Sarah's assistants. When Sarah confronted him, Josh said that he wasn't interested in Crystal, but he also made it clear that he wanted to end things with Sarah. Once Josh was safely single, it wasn't long before he and Crystal were an item. "I was devastated," Sarah says now, four years later. She was also angry - so angry that, one morning, when Crystal returned a minute late from a smoke break with Josh, Sarah nearly went ballistic over the tiny infraction. Sarah's work life and love life had merged and, as much as she liked her job, she knew she had to leave.
Most of us have heard a version of Sarah's story - office romance goes bad, footage at eleven - but as Helaine Olen and Stephanie Losee, co-authors of Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding - and Managing - Romance on the Job, point out, the occasional workplace train wreck gets all the attention because it doesn't fit the usual pattern. "You always hear the disaster stories about office romances, but you never hear how smooth most of them are-even when they don't work out," says Olen.
With more men and women working side by side than ever before and just about everyone putting in longer hours (more than one-quarter of Canadians regularly clock 10 or more hours of overtime a week, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada), the decision to cross the work-romance boundary is becoming increasingly common. A recent survey on the Canadian job website Workopolis found that 15 percent of respondents met their current partners at work, and more than half of the 12,000 Canadian and American singles who answered a 2008 questionnaire on the dating website Meet Market Adventures said that they had been romantically involved with a co-worker in the past. Add holiday office parties to the mix and the balance tips even further.
What's also changing is how office romances are perceived. Gone are the immediate associations of a breathy, big-busted secretary and her lecherous, very married boss. A recent poll in The Globe and Mail found that 70 percent of more than 10,000 participants felt that dating a co-worker didn't violate office etiquette, and 71 percent of respondents to a 2007 CareerBuilder.ca survey saw no reason to keep a relationship with a co-worker a secret.
How to separate your relationship from the work place on the next page ...
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