If you’d asked me in the late ‘90s or early aughts what I thought my adult life would look like, I’d probably point you straight to the Fox-Television-drama-slash-Josh-Groban-launching-pad known as Ally McBeal. What I remember most about the show was that Ally spent most of her time flirting with her coworkers in a cavernous gender-neutral bathroom and hanging out with her incredibly cool and gorgeous roommate, Renée. I wanted to look and dress like Renée but flirt at work like Ally.
Romcoms, television, and romance books have, in many ways, set up the office as a great place to fall in love. Not only is it easy to do, it’s also fun, and a little fraught. It has the trappings of everything that makes romance thrilling: power, secrecy, tension, and HR. What’s a young consumer of romance movies and a denizen of the Shonda-verse to do? By the time I entered the workforce, I was ready to love a coworker most ardently.
The stark reality of workplace romances is that, yes, sometimes they are fun and successful, as is the case with my friend Maya, who met her partner on the job. “The little moments of friction of walking through the door together, feeling the insane rush… it was very exhilarating,” she says of her workplace romance’s beginnings. “You were doing something wrong and that was fun.” The two went through the hallmarks of a true office romance, a will-they-won’t-they phase, a secrecy phase, and now are dealing with what it will be like if one of them gets a new job. Another friend Chloe’s office romance proved less successful. After she broke up with her boyfriend-slash-coworker, she found that it not only disrupted her now-familiar work routine, but deprived her of the most basic requirement when weathering a breakup. “What you need most is time away from your ex to move on, and that’s impossible,” she shares. Reality does indeed sometimes bite.
For showrunners and screenwriters, there’s a certain convenience to setting two would-be lovers in a location with forced proximity. Beyond that, the trope of the office romance helps folks play out certain fantasies that may feel too taboo—or even dangerous—in real life. “Fiction is a really important space where we work things out, and we cannot be pure politically in fictional spaces or in fantasy. Just because you like something in a fictional situation doesn’t mean you would do it in real life,” Hope Rehak, a script consultant and adjunct instructor at Northwestern University, says. “There needs to be a sort of wall put up between real-life behaviors and what people are enjoying in their recreational time.” The movie Secretary, a 2002 indie BDSM office romance, taught me a lot about desire and how one can express it, but if it were to happen at my small workplace? Absolutely not.
The actual work of a job very rarely comes into play in these movies, when in reality for so many of us, the work is all there really is. Meg Ryan’s character could have owned a cheese shop as long as Tom Hanks owned a fake Whole Foods. Scandal gets plenty of its non-romantic plot from the fact that Fitz is the president, but as Hope points out, when it comes to the romance, “[Shonda Rhimes] does what she did with Grey’s Anatomy, using the setting as the sexy window dressing.” A window dressing, she says, that can reflect the issues and concerns of the time.
And here’s the thing, I love to crush! I particularly love to crush at work. For me, workplace romance is never actualized, just imagined, and in a former life, obsessed over. It varies the day and gives you a reason to get up and walk around by the Kind bars in the kitchen. It’s fun and if you never take it too far, completely low stakes.
In his essay about summer crushes in the Paris Review, Hanif Abdurraqib writes, “I can hold a crush longer than most of my friends can hold a grudge. I don’t really need or even want to know whether a person shares my affection. I’m content just letting the situation play itself out at its own pace. I get that for most people, this seems agonizing. But, for all of the agony, what you get in return is the imagined person and not the actual person.” This is, in the end, what I want: an imagined person working beside me. I don’t want to know what you’re listening to in those headphones! What if it’s something about eating like a caveman, or a playlist called Alpha Jams? Bridget Jones turned her office crush into a full-fledged romance, and look how that turned out for her. (Ok, this argument falls apart if you’ve seen the new movie, but I’d rather just not have gone through all of that.) When we get down to it with office romances, it’s probably just about sex. And power. And finding something fun, anything fun, about going to work.
CREDITS
Nora Taylor is a writer, editor, and copywriter living in the Hudson Valley. Her editorial work has appeared in Architectural Digest, New York Magazine, Essence, Robb Report, and Domino. She is currently the senior editor of Citizen Magazine.
