The Office Affair ... Gone Wrong

The office affair started with the kind of maturity that gave it a chance. They both knew what they were risking. They both knew to keep the romance as quiet as Romeo and Juliet. But then, we know how it turned out for those star-crossed lovers.

She was new in the office, just out of grad school. All the guys noticed her. If they didn’t, they should have. She wasn’t a Marylin Monroe broadcasting a look-at-me sex appeal with flirtatious glances and a walk that made men stop. She was appropriate in the office on New York’s Park Avenue. She wore business suits with slacks and mostly kept her hair up. She wore makeup, of course, but nothing all that showy. Her perfume was soft and didn’t linger. He manner was as courteous as her rural Midwestern upbringing had given her. She just couldn’t help her looks and how they made men feel in the Manhattan office.

He was two years older than her and in a mid-management position. He wasn’t her boss or even in her direct chain of command. He wore the office uniform of business suits and leather shoes and would walk around the office, as many did, with his suit jacket off, his sleeves rolled up, and his tie loosened to look good but busy. He was tall, thin, and sharp, and knew how to dress—not GQ, but when you saw him you thought New York. He didn’t have a reputation of what was once called a wolf. He wasn’t a player. He was a normal young man with ambition.

They’d both leave separately for lunch and meet enough blocks away to avoid others in the office. I saw them once at a table in the front window of a restaurant in Manhattan’s Koreatown. They were making the heart shape young couples falling into each over a small table can.

The romance was secret and beautiful like that—like two teenagers hiding their budding relationship from their nosy parents—for an intoxicating three months.

Then one morning I saw him leaving with a box in his hands and a look of bewilderment on his young face. He had been called into human resources and quietly let go.

I followed him outside and we went to a coffee shop. He put the box of office awards and coffee cups by his feet. He started to tell me what happened and I nodded, told him I’d known about the office romance. I told him most of us in the office knew. What I didn’t know was she’d broken up with him the evening before.

What happened was that after she walked down a hall in the office right by him, without even giving him a sideways glance, another man he was talking to in an office coffee station nodded his head at her departing figure and whispered, “You hittin’ that?”

He didn’t answer, just smiled and walked nonchalantly away.

A woman just over a partition in a nearby cubicle overheard the crass question and the lack of a reply and took the news to her all fresh and loaded with suggestions.

She fretted all afternoon and left the office early, claiming illness. She was upset, suspicious it was only an affair to him. She felt defiled, used. She thought maybe it was a power play, a way for him to gain status with the older men in the office. His advances had been dismissed at first, but he was persistent in a boyishly romantic sort of way. She finally went out with him and made him promise to keep it quiet. She really wanted to rise up the hierarchy of the corporate ladder and she knew these minor things can get bigger, dirtier in the cancer of office gossip.

That evening she reminded him of all of this. She accused him of boasting about a sexual conquest. He denied it, sure. He told her he didn’t know where their relationship was going—too soon to talk engagement—but that his intentions were honorable. He really liked her, maybe even loved her. He said he really just didn’t know how to respond to that guy and his juvenile “you hittin’ that” comment. He couldn’t confront him. That would be too loud in the office. He couldn’t just grimace at him. The other guy was a friend and a dirty look would have to be explained. It would magnify the gossip on the men’s side, as that other guy would surely take his rebuke to others to ask their opinions—that’s what guys do. So he’d attempted to shrug it off with a smile. Stupid and childish perhaps, but what else could he do in the office?

“You could have told him to grow up,” I suggested.

He nodded, dropped his head toward his left shoulder as he considered that. “Yeah, done the right way that would have been better. I just wasn’t thinking. I just wasn’t prepared for that comment. I guess I should have been. Being a twenty something in New York is pretty wild.”

Maybe a real Casanova could have assured her, calmed her down that night, but he didn’t have the skills.

When they met he was ducking for cover through the entire conversation they had in some white-linen restaurant on 5^thAvenue. He was trying to explain with context, by telling her how men are. That made him sound guilty as hell. She sure wasn’t buying the that’s just how men are explanation.

No, he didn’t have a chance that night, not in the passion of the moment. She was scared her career was being derailed. She was afraid her reputation was suddenly that of an office harlot. No small town has anything on the gossip and judgment that can run amuck in a company staffed with young, enterprising people, especially in “Sex and the City” Manhattan. She wanted to know if he’d given details about their sexual explorations to the guys. Was there gossip out there about the noises she made, the things she liked? Denying that in whispers in some Italian restaurant where the tables almost touch sounded like an affirmation to her.

Someone also told her he’d had another office romance the year before. She was informed that the woman had moved on. She confronted him about this other girl and he told her it had nothing to do with their relationship and that it hadn’t been much anyway. That other woman left for a better position at a large firm downtown. He said he’d put them in touch if she liked. She bristled and said, “You mean you’re still in touch with her?”

The next morning she went to human resources. She’d later say she didn’t want him fired. She just wanted to know her options. But the process once begun moved quickly. The easiest way for the company to protect itself from a lawsuit for sexual harassment was to let the man go and quickly.

“Look, there are monsters out there,” he said as he tossed his head at a canyon of glass high-rises outside the coffeeshop. “But I am not one. I’m still nuts about her. Well, I don’t know how I feel now. She did this to me. All I did was fall for her and she got me terminated. Maybe I should just forget about her. Maybe she’s poison.”

They laugh about it now.

They are married and live in a Midwestern city and have two kids and good careers, though for different companies.

“This wasn’t some #MeToo thing,” she now says. “I guess I just didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t understand how things are. How could I? How can anyone? Things are changing so fast. And they need to, I mean, there are some very bad guys out there. But there needs to be commonsense, too. We need rules, a process that’s fair that protects the vulnerable and that doesn’t just punish men by default.”

This guy lost his job for not defending his lady and because it was the legally expedient thing for his employer to do. He recovered, as there really wasn’t anything there and he is young and enterprising. He also kept his head. Even when he was being let go he was polite to the head of human resources, a woman who was sincerely apologetic, as a result, he was able to get good references despite the termination for cause.

Many aren’t so lucky. Too many lose their tempers and lash out when they get caught-up in something they think is overblown or even a complete fabrication. They forget that a man should defend himself soberly and strongly, but that he also must keep his head when doing so.

As Rudyard Kipling said in his poem “If”: “If you can keep your head when all about you; Are losing theirs and blaming it on you … you’ll be a Man, my son!”

As men, we must know (or learn) that no matter how evocative a woman is in the workplace, no matter how much skin any young, gorgeous female shows, this must have nothing to do with how any man treats her in the workplace.

Even if that is unfair, even counter to human nature, the feminists are right about that much; if for the wrong reason, as a gentleman must have control of himself, even of his eyes, no matter what occurs in front of him. This is so because a man does have accountability for his actions even when provoked—or especially when provoked.

Women, like men, should also have accountability for how they dress and behave, but it’s a fool who sets himself up as a judge and jury of other’s attire, style, or looks. If it’s your workplace you can set parameters. If you’re smart, you’ll task a woman (or women) who are in the appropriate job category with enforcing the agreed upon dress restrictions on other women. Outside of that, you are not going to change the culture of even your workplace.

Men and women have wonderful differences, but these differences don’t give you the right to stare, make sexual jokes, or to demean a woman or a man. Again, proper conduct comes down to your maturity, self-control, and manners.