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Office Romance

Understand that if it doesn't work out, you may have to leave your job. At the computer-software company where they worked, Troy would leave chocolates on Sondra's chair and love poems in her mailbox. Troy was smart and funny and "you could tell he was really into me," Sondra says. So she decided to give dating him a whirl. Before long Sondra, 30, fell in love.

"Nobody in the office knew. We kept it a secret for two years even though we slept together every single night," she says. "I would go into the building first, and he would go get coffee. In the evenings I would leave and wait around the corner and he would meet me."

They worked in the same department, but Troy started to make moves, climbing up the ranks, leaving Sondra behind. "It really put a strain on our relationship," she says. They would come home and argue about work. One day Troy told her he'd had enough. "Monday I was talking about our going to Europe, and Wednesday he broke up with me," Sondra says. "It came out of nowhere."

For eight excruciating months Sondra continued to work at the same company as her ex, in an office next door to his. "To have to see him every day was torture," she says. "And then I would get these memos saying Troy had gotten some new promotion. From my office I could hear him laughing on the phone. Meanwhile, I was practically slitting my wrists."

Sondra took a three-week leave of absence and tried to pull herself together. But the minute she set foot back in the office she felt worse than before. "I'd be on the phone with my friend and she'd be saying, `Okay, take a deep breath'--it was like that," Sondra recalls. She would leave the office for hours to take long, tearful walks by the highway across town. "I lost 12 pounds," she says. "And I lost all interest in my work. The breakup ruined my concentration, my focus, my ambition at the company. I just didn't want to be there." One day Sondra's supervisor took her aside and told her to shape up or else he would have to let her go.

Unfortunately Sondra's experience is hardly uncommon in workplace romances. "People want to think the relationship will last forever," says psychologist Joni Johnston. "But really, think about how many people you date, and how many people you marry, and what are the odds?"

Anticipating a breakup is difficult enough, but predicting the emotional meltdown Sondra experienced takes the kind of self-awareness that most of us have only in retrospect. Sondra eventually quit her job and left the company. Within two weeks she was back to her old self. "It was like a total transformation, like a shroud had been lifted," she says. "I realize I'm way too emotional to date someone from work. The minute the relationship was over, I had to get away from him."

Don't be, swept away by his power, money and prestige. Arlington, 42, swears up and down he really doesn't believe in workplace romances. "People say, `This will only be for fun,' but it's usually more than that," he says. "Someone is going to get hurt."

He should know. Over the past few years, the exec has dated eight different women who've worked for his company, some of whom reported directly to him. "If you are in a position of power, people are attracted to that," he says with a shrug. And it doesn't hurt that Arlington likes to treat his ladies exceptionally well.

A few years ago he had an assistant, Jill, whom he grew very fond of. "She was a great assistant," he says. After watching Jill date one loser after another, Arlington decided to take it upon himself to show Jill how a real man behaves. He wanted her to be able to say to herself: If a man doesn't treat me like this, then I don't need him. "I qualified all that by telling her I had a girlfriend," he says. "So really it was: You need to find a man who treats you like this but doesn't have a girlfriend."

There were dinners, gifts, jewelry and weekends in the Caribbean. You name it, Arlington paid for it. "When a man is spending that kind of money on you, it's easy to get deluded into thinking this is more than it is," observes Johnston. Then there are the inevitable problems women face if coworkers discover the relationship. "I've been consulting in office settings for ten years," says Johnston, "and I've never encountered a woman who was sleeping with her boss just to get ahead, but I've certainly encountered people outside the relationship who thought that's what was going on. True or false, perception can be reality in the workplace."

In the end, Arlington broke off his relationship with Jill. Even though he says he loved her, he was clear about the fact that they had no future; he was never going to break up with his girl. "There were tears and pain and misery," he says. "All this just reminded me that office romances are not a healthy thing, primarily because I have a girlfriend." Still Arlington admits that, in the years since Jill, he's had three more relationships with women from work.
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