Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better. This is part of Breakup Week. We just can’t do this anymore.
Breakups are miserable under the best of circumstances. But when the person you’re breaking up with is also a co-worker, welcome to a new layer of hell—you still have to see each other every day, smile politely in meetings, and pretend nothing is wrong while coexisting professionally in an office that now feels charged with history.
This person describes what it was like to process a breakup while being physically unable to escape their co-worker ex:
I dated a co-worker who eventually broke up with me, and our cubicles had a common wall. I had to listen to her a lot on the phone. What made it worse was that I was a “rebound” guy and she went back to her old boyfriend and so would talk to him on the phone while I had to overhear all their conversations. It was painful for months and made focusing on work really hard. Usually work is the place where you can go to not think about a breakup.
Complicating things further, the aftermath of an office relationship can introduce professional risks, particularly if there’s a power imbalance involved.
This person wrote to me after ending a relationship with a more senior co-worker, worried that the breakup might suddenly reshape his job in ways he couldn’t control:
About a year ago, I developed a relationship with a co-worker. (I know, not smart!) I never directly reported to her, but we are on the same team, and she is at a higher level. I work on some of her projects.
This weekend, I ended the relationship. She’s been having a difficult time accepting this, and there’s a lot of hurt and anger. The relationship has never impacted our work situation or job performance in the past—we have always remained professional—but it looks like it might now.
In order to give herself the space and distance she says she needs to get past the breakup, she feels I shouldn’t work on her projects moving forward, or at least for the time being. We both want to attempt to navigate this without having to directly notify our boss and HR of the relationship, since that would severely impact both of us, which we’d both like to avoid. One of her points is that it could impact me the worst because I’d be easier to remove from the team if they wanted to.
Some couples try to plan for this scenario in advance, making agreements about what would happen if the relationship ever ended. In practice, those plans tend to collapse once they’re actually needed:
My partner of eight years and I just split up. Recently, I helped her get a job at my longtime workplace. I have worked there for more than 10 years. Our relationship has been rocky in the past, so when I helped her get a job at my workplace, I asked her to promise me she would find something else if we split up. Well, we broke up and she won’t leave. I am planning on asking my HR department for help. I don’t know what they can do for me. I’m thinking about quitting, which I absolutely do not want to do.
The fallout doesn’t just land on the couple, either. Workplace breakups, especially messy ones, frequently spill outward, subjecting colleagues to tension and drama:
I have two co-workers who have dated and lived together for seven years. They recently went through a messy breakup, and now other staff members—mostly myself—are being asked to rearrange our shifts so they don’t have to work the same shift together. We are a very small staff, so I didn’t mind helping out to keep the peace. Now, their requests are interfering with my typical days off (Saturdays, Fridays), so I’m increasingly having to adjust my schedule—and now, even a vacation—to make accommodations for the end of their relationship. It’s been a month now, with no signs of our management improving the situation.
In workplaces where personal and professional boundaries are already thin, breakups can turn outright toxic:
I used to work at a very small software company. One of the two sales guys was dating our manager; they had been dating before, and she got him the job because her brother owned the company and basically let her do whatever she wanted.
She was a terrible manager, and all of us on the sales team really didn’t like her. Things started to get tense between the manager and the salesman she was dating, and about two months after he started, they had this big trip to a cabin planned. Well, lo and behold, they came back and had broken up during the trip. The salesman continued to work with us for about six weeks, and they had the worst working relationship in the world. She started treating the other salesman way better and even instructed me to funnel more leads to him. The salesman would offer to take someone out to lunch and then spend the whole time talking smack about the manager! It was just awful and uncomfortable.
Think that’s bad? Sometimes workplace breakups go even further and actively break the work itself. This person recalls a split that managed to derail an entire stage production:
I was in a truly terrible musical that culminated its awfulness with the conductor and the stage director, who had been dating, breaking up during a six-hour-long tech-week rehearsal and no longer speaking to each other for the rest of the run of the show. Which meant our musical cues and stage direction no longer matched up for the second half of the second act. It wasn’t great.
And then there are the workplaces where splits recur over and over, dragging everyone else along for the ride.
I had a co-worker who sat next to his girlfriend, and they worked in the same department. They were classic high school sweethearts who had been dating for years and got married while working there.
Turns out, she was cheating on him for years with someone else who sat next to them in the same department. They divorced, while sitting next to each other, and the girl married the new guy. Later on, the girl left for a different place for a couple years, and then divorced the new guy. Then she came back TO THE SAME DEPARTMENT and sat next to her ex-husband and proceeded to date someone else while cheating on them with the original guy. I think they even got remarried or they were dating by the time I left—it was unclear.
On the other hand, not every workplace split ends in quiet suffering. Occasionally, the aftermath produces something closer to performance art:
I used to work in a wildly licentious industry where every trade show, conference, meeting, lunch hour or, like, Tuesday afternoon was an eagerly seized-upon opportunity to step outside one’s marriage. My favorite was the woman who was pushed out of her husband’s company after he cheated on her at one of those aforementioned events. After their divorce, she started her own company and regional association in the same industry out of pure spite, handily eclipsed his business until he sold it and exited the industry entirely, and then issued an absolutely beautiful press release when she got remarried to someone else in the industry.
At least office breakup drama can sometimes provide entertainment value for the bystanders forced to witness it:
My last boss had a “personal assistant,” who I’m pretty sure was his girlfriend. I actually liked her; she’d show up now and then at the office in fabulous pink leopard prints and do absolutely no work, but she had a great personality and seemed like a woman who didn’t take crap from anyone. I guess she got fed up with my control freak boss, because one day they got into a screaming argument in the office and my boss sent the rest of the admin staff home early. The next day his personal assistant had vanished, never to be seen again, and so had the office microwave.
It’s easy to read these stories and conclude no one should ever date co-workers. Realistically, though, we spend a huge amount of time at work, and people are always going to meet partners there. But anyone contemplating romance with a colleague should at least remember that most relationships end eventually, and you can’t go no-contact with someone you share a printer with.
