30 August 2013

LOVE AT WORK - The Office Dating Pool



Why the office so often breeds romance?





Romance in the Boardroom

Everyone's working faster and smarter these days, putting more of themselves into it. The changing rules about the ways we work are literally and figuratively heating up the workplace. There's an explosion of love at the office, in defiance of what most of us were taught.

I see it weekly in the very lengthy wedding announcements reported in my hometown newspaper, The New York Times. The Times has taken to drawing portraits of mating scenarios, and in an astonishing number of instances, the couples met on the job. That awareness was merely hovering in the back of my mind. Then, in one week, I separately met two different couples in which the eventual partners first glimpsed each other in the office.

This outbreak of love at work comes as no surprise to me really. It has always been like this in publishing, at least on the editorial side.

Writers and editors crawl onto a creative edge as often as they can force themselves to do it; it's as painful as it is exhilarating. Even the seemingly simple act of writing a good headline, for example, demands that you draw on everything you know by whatever means you know it. You have to be open to your accumulated experience. You're always risking success and failure, exposing yourself—in front of all your colleagues. It's a whole-body charge when you succeed. That energy is downright sexy.

Then the relentless deadlines strip from our personality any veneer we might muster in more formal settings. I believe this is true of all work situations, not just publishing. There are always deadlines that have to be met. Reports that have to be written.

So I scarcely batted an eye when my two new couple-friends confessed they had met on the job. They weren't looking for it, but it happened. And it wasn't in publishing, either.

It's easy enough to see why. In the workplace we are at our best, giving our all. And we are usually dressed pretty well too.

What's more, we are always appraising the people around us, and this is as true of the most buttoned-up company as in the most casual enterprise. My guess is it's even more so in buttoned-up places, because the less that information is openly shared, the more you need to make evaluations of your colleagues merely for self-protection.

We size people up as human beings, as workers, as allies, as bearers of traits we like, as attractive specimens, as potential dating or mating material. To deny it is to lie, although the indices by which we perform this appraisal might differ from person to person. I have worked in organizations large and small, and we've always played the assessment game.

Evolutionary psychologists might insist this is the triumph of the all-powerful mating drive. And maybe it is. Males and females certainly add their own special twists on this.

But the sex-on-the-brain perspective might be a touch too narrow a lens for viewing what may simply be an all-purpose human drive. We're always making assessments of people even when we don't mean to. That's what stereotypes are. Especially in the primordial muck, they had survival value. How much more charming to make people assessment a social activity and add the potential useful views of others, our colleagues.

This assessment game crosses gender and age lines in too many ways for it to be exclusively a function of mating. Everyone does it; different people carry it out with differing degrees of discretion. Or perception.

These days we see more of, and more sides of, our colleagues than ever before. So if in making these appraisals two people find that the columns line up, and their affinities are staring them in the face.

Of course, I can see what an organizational thicket it could present if, say, a key manager's motivation in every decision hinged on the impact on a coworker/lover. But the fact of the matter is, it always has; we just acted as if it didn't. Management decisions have always spilled over to our loved ones, whose response, in turn, affected us; but up until now the spillover happened off site, at home, and thus those doing the managing weren't aware of the ripple effects of their actions.

So some managers find that workplace romances plunge them into a new web of social complexity. But as far as I can see, that's just where we all belong, where we always have been, but only now are beginning to openly acknowledge.

My only complaint is, now that I'm single again (widowed), I wish I worked in a much bigger office.


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