Office romance: Convenience or career suicide?

What you need to know:

  • A new, hot employee has just joined your department. Everyone is jostling for their attention. Beware if what you are after is a serious relationship

We spend the better part of our waking hours at our places of work. More often than not, our colleagues are our closest friends, confidantes and supporters in times of difficulty.

Places of work therefore offer fertile opportunities for romantic relationships to cross the limits and become thriving and intimate.

But how workable are they?

A Pandora’s Box

That new, lovely and well-appointed marketing girl that you cannot stop thinking about could be leaving some higher authority in knots as well. Or that tall, dark and handsome new guy in accounts with all the cool moves?

He may make your girlfriends green with envy and turn them against you. Unless you can establish that there is no possibility of conflict (which is challenging), it could be the one move you may live to regret.

For Jeremy, a freelance marketer, office romance yielded a wife but at a price. He used to work at a leading Internet Service provider. For him, workplace affairs were always a no-no. But that was until Jackline joined the company.

“Jackie had the kind of looks that you just could not ignore if you are normal. Every man in the office was drooling over her,” he reminisces.

“Very quickly, I knew she would be the subject of an intense scramble. The man who could get her would be the office First Among Equals. I got the headstart every man in the office craved when Jackline was assigned under my immediate watch. Tuning her was not easy with all the men circling around her like vultures. But in the end, I got my way and we started dating.”

While Jeremy paraded his new love for the entire office to appreciate his hunting qualities, the Managing Director was anything but impressed.

All along, he had his eyes set on Jackline as well but he had not yet found the opportunity to strike. Being the MD, and married, he had to be subtle in his approach. When word went round that Jeremy and Jackline were dating, he revealed his hand.

“He called me into his office and asked whether it was true that we were dating,” says Jeremy. “He rambled on about office romance being unethical and distracting and said he would be reassigning Jackie. Of course by then, it was too late. Jackie and I continued to see each other.”

“The MD did make romantic attempts towards Jackie but she refused his advances. That is when the war against me started. He put me under immense pressure, harassed me all the time and in the end, I had to leave the company. Jackie had to follow me soon after as the boss pursued her seriously after I left. Our affair cost us our jobs but Jackie and I are today happily married. It was worth it but with jobs hard to come by, I would never recommend office romance to anybody because of all the attendant drama," Jeremy says.

Dirty Linen

Every time you open your heart to somebody, you also give them an opportunity to know you extremely well. Unless you are Angel Gabriel, you definitely have your dark spots, yes...we all do.

Your mother may be a tigress who sends your dad ducking for cover every time she sneezes. Or how you once abused drugs. Or did a jail term for stealing the neighbour’s chicken.

Or how you were forced to walk around high school with all the panties and petticoats you had stolen from fellow girls...There is always the risk that your best kept secrets could end up being whispered around the office corridors - sometimes with grave or very embarrassing consequences. Achieng was so humiliated she had to leave the country to save face.

“Hell hath no fury like a man scorned,” she recollects the experience that changed her life.

“Abuga got me a job in his company and we dated for a while. But he was not that interesting and when I met Alex, I did not have to think twice about leaving Abuga for him. He was everything a woman wants in a man and even though I was indebted to Abuga for getting me a job and we were all working in the same company, I felt I had to take the risk.”

But the risk was perhaps too huge in the end. Abuga had, during his better times with Achieng, secretly photographed her while she was sleeping nude and to get his own back at her, he posted the photos on the Internet.

“The whole office was scandalised beyond belief. I could no longer look my friends or family in the face and I had to get away to recover. I swore never to yield to office romance no matter how tempting.”

Prisoner

Nothing changes people more than love. Nothing demands more from people than love. When the office joker gets hitched to the girl three desks away, his humour evaporates faster than petrol. This is because of the ‘unofficial’ requirement that we behave in a particular way around our spouses.

Office romance is limiting, tiring and may end up making you the office bore who nobody wants to be around.

Tom was always making everybody melt away in laughter at the plant where he works in Thika. When his humour suddenly evaporated, it did not take long for Joshua – his colleague and friend – to find out why. He had become romantically involved with the deputy supervisor.

Alice, Tom’s new love, was a strict girl who had a serious approach to life and Tom was at pains to try and conform.

“Tom tried to sacrifice his natural personality to fit in with Alice’s demeanour,” Joshua confides. “But because of the hypocrisy involved, he could not keep it up and soon they were having problems. They could just not cope. Alice left to continue with her studies and Tom came back to his old self. Had they not worked together, maybe it would have worked out for them.”

Time Bomb

Nothing ends up with more pain than a love affair gone awry. You have never seen a more bitter and emotional war than a love affair that ends in an ugly way.

And because leopards will never lose their spots, if a guy is a womanizer, he may still be tempted to have an affair in that same office. That leads to a nasty war between the involved colleagues.

And while you may survive it, it may leave you in an undesirable position in the workplace. Or she may have an affair with some bigger boss reducing you to suffering helplessly because you may need the job too much to attempt a redress.

Charo, a civil servant in Mombasa, sports a scar that hides the story of a bungled romantic adventure. He previously worked in Kilifi. While there, he started a secret affair with two female co-workers. To add to the twist, the two women were both married. Mwalimu – one of the women’s husbands, finding his wife a much changed animal, did his investigations and soon discovered what was going on.

Realising that Charo was also seeing his friend’s wife, Mwalimu had somebody take photos of Charo with the two women in compromised situations.

Armed with the pictures, the two men confronted Charo and gave him a thorough beating. Thereafter, he was transferred to Mombasa.

“We found out about this through friends in Kilifi,” a colleague of Charo’s in Mombasa discloses. “When he joined us, he was very docile. And never talks much in the office. We really wanted to know what was going on with him, you know. He must have learned his lesson because he keeps to himself and hardly talks to anyone.”

Too Close For Comfort

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, or so the saying goes. There are couples who manage working together fairly well but they would probably advise you against office relationships. Romance thrives on catching up, sharing experiences and finding interesting stuff to discuss.

This is next to impossible if you are constantly bumping into each other all the time, you commute together to work and so on. At the end of the day, you might find yourself wishing you had the day to yourself and your friends and other colleagues and only met your better half at the end of the day.

Authority

A man is the head of the family even though this is no longer as clear as it was traditionally. A man’s level of domestic importance is maintained by behaving in a certain way and being seen to be in charge of situations. This may be difficult to uphold especially in high pressure office situations.

You can imagine a man who receives a dressing down for poor performance in front of his partner. Or a scenario where the woman outperforms her man month after month and she shoots up the ranks while he remains rooted at the bottom..what do you think the woman would think of her man? Many things none of which would be positive or helpful.

Stacia and Kevin got married while still at the university. After graduating, they both joined an insurance company where Kevin’s father had established himself as one of the country’s most successful salesman. In that industry, you take time to get your foothold. Once that had happened, the capabilities of the two started to manifest itself.

“Stacia is the dream salesperson,” the agency manager at their office says.

“Her target making, communication and desire are out of this world. She is presently one of the top agents in the country. Kevin is not poor. But he is no comparison to Stacia. In fact, none of my staff can match her productivity. When this couple started working here, they were always together. Now they hardly talk to each other in the office. You can imagine what damage this is doing to their relationship when they are out of the office. You can see that as Stacia enjoys her rise to the top, Kevin is becoming increasingly resentful towards her. Kevin is feeling so challenged by his wife’s success that he is now actively looking for a job elsewhere. That’s the only way they will keep their marriage intact,” the boss offers.

Office romance offers the inducement of accessibility and convenience in the initial stages. But if you consider the advantages and the disadvantages, you will definitely give such affairs short shrift.

If you are already in the deep end of one, then you need to work extra hard to make it work seamlessly knowing that eventually, one of you has to leave the company. But if you are considering one, then please think again unless all you want is a transient good time. Nine out of 10 times, they don’t work.

People need their space to be free around their friends and colleagues. This is hardly possible when you have your spouse, girlfriend or boyfriend watching you all the time. There may be no hanky panky going on but you ncan never quite relax around them and interact normally with other colleagues - both male and female- and this is not healthy, says Jeremy.