 One day a few months back my friend Jen* dragged me into the ladies’ room the second I got to work. “You’ll never guess who I slept with last night,” she said. “Mark!” I think I actually gagged. Mark was another coworker, a weasely know-it-all who wore his khakis way too tight. Apparently, after an extended happy hour, Jen ceased to care that he was widely considered the office douche. She was horny and reasonably confident that he at least wasn’t quite as scary as the creep who’d been eyeing her from the end of the bar. So she took Mark home—kicking off what I have to imagine was the luckiest night of his life.
Mark’s luck isn’t about to run out anytime soon, however—so long as he keeps reporting to work, where he’s surrounded by single females. According to a 2007 survey by career research company Vault, Inc., 47 percent of coworkers have dipped their pens in each other’s inkwells at some point. Office affairs have been around forever, but they’ve undergone an evolution. It’s no longer the age of Mad Men, when upper management was a boys’ club, and naive secretaries offered easy romantic foils. Thanks to women’s ascendance in the workplace, longer workdays, and later marriages, today’s offices are filled with ambitious young singles (and not-so-singles). The workplace has morphed into the modern dating pool, and as a result, several different types of office affairs have emerged—each with its own allures and potential disasters. If you haven’t had one yet, chances are you will before you cash in that 401(k).
The Work Spouse
Work wives and husbands aren’t having sex—nor are they actually married—but they might as well be. As far as everyone else in the office is concerned, something shady is going on, what with the daily lunches, closed-door “meetings” to share office gossip, and constant e-mails followed by muffled laughter. From nine to five, work spouses are closer to each other than they are with anyone else—even, in certain cases, their actual spouses. “One of my married sisters has a ‘work husband,’ ” says Melissa, a 39-year-old editor. “She talks about Mike all the time. I’ve never met the guy, but I know his birthday, his favorite place to vacation…I honestly think my sister would fuck him if there were no consequences. She speaks of him much more excitedly than she does my brother-in-law.”
Of course there’s considerable benefit to having a work spouse. You have an ally in a stressful environment, someone who understands exactly what bugs you at your job in a way that significant others outside of work can’t. “We have a rapport my ex and I never did,” says Laila, a 28-year-old medical researcher, of her work husband. “It developed after months of sitting across from each other, griping about the losers we work with. We can communicate with eye contact alone now.” But she has no desire to consummate the relationship. “Sex would change things between us,” she says. “We work well together because we’re so close, and flirting makes work fun. It’s perfect as is—I don’t want the drama a real affair brings.”
The Overnight Meeting
As easy as it is to fall into bed with a coworker, it’s twice as difficult to face them in the morning. Best-case scenario, you both behave like nothing happened—and pass each other in the halls knowing you’ve gotten away with something. But when one person views the sex as a colossal mistake, it can translate into years of dodging elevators and eating lunch alone.
“Shortly after joining a new ad agency, I went home with a really cute copywriter,” says Sophie, 30, also a writer. “We had amazing sex, and the next day I left a Post-it on his computer saying, ‘Thanks for a great time.’ When we all went out that night, I assumed we’d go home together again. Instead, he showed up with a chick he introduced to me as his girlfriend.” Sophie was so angry she spent the next year and a half avoiding him, and their colleagues had to decide which of them to invite out for drinks. “It was horrible. I used to send an intern as a go-between so I wouldn’t have to talk to him.”
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