The Romantically Charged ‘80s Office
Monday at 7 a.m., in every city across America, they will emerge again after a two-day absence: millions of men with wet hair, wearing suits and Nikes; millions of women in dresses, wearing Reeboks over panty hose; both groups carrying a briefcase in one hand and a duffel bag in the other.
It is the contents of their daily luggage that signal a change in the American workplace: high heels, cuff links, neckties, hair dryers, makeup, perfume, maybe a toothbrush, maybe even a change of clothes.
Who are these young singles dressing up for? And who are they going home with after work? The answer, increasingly, is . . . their fellow workers. And this means a blending of personal and professional lives, just as the paraphernalia of work and play are blended in the briefcases and duffel bags they carry to work.
Slowly, almost deceptively, the places where we work are becoming the places where we seek romantic and sexual fulfillment. Behind this shift lie some fundamental changes in the way Americans work and socialize. As this trend spreads, and rising numbers of Americans begin to mix their emotional lives with their professional careers, they are finding some awkward and unforeseen problems.
“Most workers feel they need to leave their sexuality in the parking lot for fear of involvement in an office romance,” said Judith Katz, vice president of Kaleel Jamison Associates, a management-consulting firm based in Cincinnati.
Observes Mary, a Boston-based manager of a computer-services firm: “Once you cross the line (into office romance) everything changes. You view your job, your potential within the organization and the relationship within a different light.”
For the first several years of her office romance, she and her partner chose not to acknowledge the relationship to their peers and colleagues, though they knew they were an item of office gossip.
“The good part,” she says, “is that you bring into (the relationship) a shared vision of work and an understanding of a common work culture. It does have its pitfalls and stresses, but it is still more attractive than many of the alternatives for finding romance.”
Suppressing office romance isn’t easy--and it may not make sense. For the workplace in the late 1980s has become a bona fide setting for meeting potential partners. In the modern office, there’s greater equality between men and women, and greater chance for meaningful emotional interaction. The workplace may still be a locus for exploitative sexual relationships--like the traditional affair between the boss and his secretary. But it can also be a place where men and women meet on equal ground. And it can be one of the few places for spontaneity in an adult’s life--where men and women can relax and interact with less pressure than in many social situations.
Researchers agree that organizational romance is increasing, but there’s little detailed or reliable data to explain why. Management consultants say they are dealing with the issue more, often in helping companies prepare sexual-harassment policies. And there’s a growing sense that the blurring of professional and personal roles may fundamentally alter the unspoken “rules” of corporate life.
Barbara Gutek, a professor of psychology at the Claremont Graduate School, conducted a six-year study of sex at work. In her recent book, “Sex and the Workplace,” she states that more than 80% of workers report some kind of “social-sexual” experience on their jobs, and that as many as 35 million Americans have such a work-related experience each week. She explains: “I have found sex at work a problem for up to half of all workers--not surprisingly, for many more women than men.”
Unwanted Sexual Attention
The most awkward problem for women is sexual harassment. Many women complain that unwanted sexual attention--teasing, jokes, remarks, touches and gestures--is common in the workplace; 42% of the women working for the federal government say they have been sexually harassed in a recent two-year period, the Merit Systems Protection Board reported recently. Because of these concerns, many managers would like to keep sex out of the office and deal with colleagues on a purely professional basis.
Why are organizational romances now occurring more often, more openly, and for longer periods of time? Why, in short, is the old-fashioned office “affair” being replaced by the new office “relationship”? Four primary causes are evident:
--New opportunities. The demography of the American labor force has changed significantly in the last 25 years, so that far more men now spend their days working next to women who are their equals, not their secretaries.
This demographic change is the fundamental factor behind increased romance at work. In 1960, the work force was 34% women and 66% men. By 1980, it was 42% women and 58% men; work-force participation among women rose from 34% to 51% in only 20 years. In the same period, the rate of participation among men fell from 83% to 78%.
The growth of women in managerial and professional jobs is even more striking. Between 1970 and 1980, in the national pool of all managers and administrators, participation by women rose from 16% to 26%. In the same decade, the increase in the proportion of female clerical workers was only 2%, and female service workers in general declined as a proportion by almost 5%. Thus, many more females are entering the work force, with the increase being seen most dramatically at the managerial level or above.
These changes are crucial, because most researchers agree that romantic connections at work are formed on the basis of proximity, shared motives and common work-group characteristics (such as closeness of supervision, organizational rules and expectations, and the nature of the work).
Shared work brings shared emotions--and occasionally, in moments of success or failure, physical gestures of affection. When a work project brings with it a high degree of tension, stress and competition, the response to “winning”--whether it is the contract, design concept, political strategy or sales goal--naturally and effortlessly yields the social-sexual release of touching, holding and hugging. Winning is exciting. Physical connection in response is both natural and charged.
“As people who have interesting careers have always known, work is very sexy, and the people with whom one is working are the people who excite,” explained R. Seidenberg in “Corporate Wives-Corporate Casualties.”
“A day spent launching a project or writing a paper or running a seminar is more likely to stimulate--intellectually and sexually--than an evening spent sharing TV or discussing lawn problems. . . .”
Corporate romances between people married to others do seem to be increasing, at least according to figures quoted in such varied publications as the New York Times and Playboy. The figures are noticeably higher than those offered in Alfred Kinsey’s 1950s surveys.
--Less leisure time. More people are falling in love at work because they have less time for love to grow anywhere else. Whether we call it free time, personal time or simply “non-work” time, it is gradually disappearing from our lives.
A new Louis Harris poll shows that the hours worked by Americans have increased by 20% since 1973, while leisure time has shrunk by 32%. Although government statistics do not match his assertions, Harris contends this is due to a rise in salaried employees who are paid overtime and thus not as easily monitored. His surveys suggest that professional people now work 52.2 hours per week, while owners and employees of small businesses work 57.3 hours per week.
As weekly hours accumulate and workers become more job-oriented and mobile, they also become increasingly cut off from their family members, from their neighborhoods and from the support and involvement provided by other social institutions. Relationships unconnected to work are increasingly tenuous in a decade that blends personal development and professional achievement so seamlessly. After interviewing 3,700 corporate executives, business psychologist Srully Blotnick concluded that marriages to those outside one’s professions, “die of neglect. . . . The partners become so caught up in their work they have less and less time for one another.”
--New attitudes toward social relationships and dating. The phrases ask for a date or double-date recall a more courtly and naive period in our cultural history.
Traditional dating has declined, in part, because of a pervasive shift away from leading (or even wanting) a “public” life. As we begin to connect our homes and offices by computer, and as we order groceries, toys and clothing via home-shopping networks, the meaning and purpose in going “out” and being seen “in public” are subtly altered in each worker and consumer. Trend-watcher Faith Popcorn calls it “cocooning”--the desire to make purchases that can provide control, comfort and security against what is perceived as a harsh outside world.
For a person who is searching for a romantic relationship, familiar spaces such as malls, restaurants and--most easily and cheaply--the office are far more conducive environments in which to relax and connect with others than an unknown street or neighborhood. When chilling new factors like the spread of AIDS are added to the emotional landscape, one can understand more readily why 41% of the newly married respondents to Shere Hite’s survey in “Women and Love” said one reason they got married was the exhaustion and depression they experienced from being single.
Office networking provides an information service that is part social, part medical, part financial and part secretarial. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter has written, in the modern company “everybody is worth meeting. It’s like a dating service in a corporation.”
--Media reinforcement. Although we have less leisure time each year, we steadily spend a greater part of it watching television. According to A. C. Nielsen, television viewing has increased from 6 hours 36 minutes daily per household in 1980 to 7 hours 5 minutes in 1987. Television is now turning our appreciation, even our comprehension, of traditional sexuality and romance into a colorless mush.
Neil Postman, in his article, “The Disappearance of Childhood,” writes that television “not only keeps the entire population in a condition of high sexual excitement, but it stresses a kind of egalitarianism of sexual fulfillment. On television, sex is transformed from a dark and profound adult mystery to a product that is available to everyone, like mouthwash. . . .”
With its technique and content, television urges the growth of romance in the workplace. After reducing every watcher to an identical, youthful “age,” television relentlessly undermines most of the characters’ capacities to be adult, to say no and mean it, to live with uncertainty. Viewers are encouraged to remain immature, says Postman, with “no sense of belonging, no capacity for lasting relationships, no respect for limits, no grasp of the future.” This reinforces our tendency to select sexual partners with whom we spend the most time--especially time that is natural and neutral, such as the time we spend with co-workers.
Consider the following recent television programs: “Hart to Hart,” “Dynasty,” “Remington Steele,” “Hotel,” “Cheers,” “L.A. Law” and the premier example, “Moonlighting.” In each of these shows, a romantic relationship with a co-worker is (or was) near the center of the plot. Consider each program without its principal romance: None would have been as powerful or popular. It is a telling indicator of the media’s persuasiveness that so many viewers no longer realize Krystle Carrington entered our lives in “Dynasty” as a single woman: Blake’s secretary.
The problems of dealing with sex at work are just beginning. “Acknowledging romance at work makes corporations very nervous,” says Katz. “Corporate life is about control, order and power. Structure is important. Introducing the reality that sexual relationships exist among workers and must be acknowledged as phenomena by managers is difficult. Bringing sex into the dynamic of the office triggers something that feels out of control.”
When social and sexual behaviors take a step forward, business behavior takes a generation or two to reach the same stage. Many American companies are still struggling to develop their first sexual-harassment policy, let alone a broader stance toward corporate romance. The most common organizational response to the matter remains no response at all.
Corporate attempts to deal more directly with the issue sometimes misfire. An example is a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, titled “Managers and Lovers,” which urged supervisors “to advise the couple to get outside help,” or “to persuade the couple that either the person least essential to the company or both have to go.” These admonitions ignore the underlying causes--and the inevitability--of the new blending of personal and professional lives.
