It is a series of trade-offs

WASHINGTON, DC: Last year, in an annual office romance survey published by careerbuilder.com, a leading career management website in the US, nearly 50 per cent of all those interviewed said they have dated a co-worker, and 37 per cent felt compelled to keep their relationship a secret. One-fifth of those surveyed said they dated their boss, and 40 per cent said they have dated someone at a higher position at their workplace.

It all came to pass, thus, when the relationship between World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz and a senior communications officer at the Bank, Shaha Riza was outed, there were no eyebrows raised at their affair; its consequences, however, have shaken the very foundation of the world’s premier lending institution.

Rosemary Haefner, vice-president of HR at CareerBuilder, says, “It’s important to remember that even if both sides are willing participants, office relationships could have repercussions. One-in-ten workers say their office romance drove them to leave their job.”

Says Washington Post’s Life at Work columnist Amy Joyce, “For many organisations, romance among colleagues is just another part of the longer workdays and open camaraderie of the modern workplace. Some companies seem to almost encourage inter-office relationships, holding company happy hours and social events.”

However, there is a definite line between treating the office as a workplace and as an eight-hour date, feels Joyce. When a distressed advice-seeker admonished one of her recommendations that work comes first in an office relationship, she shot back: “You think you should treat your 8 hours at work as a date? I don’t think so. I don’t mean work comes first in LIFE, I mean work comes first when you are AT work. You can’t sit at your loved one’s desk all day, or take three-hour lunches with her. Get it?”

Her top advice? “Don’t date your boss.” Look what happened when Wolfowitz. Sometimes, office romances and trysts could get out of hand, and downright dangerous. Laurie Friend (name changed), who had a failed affair with a senior colleague in a Washington law firm, had a new Orkut profile made in her name by the same guy she dumped. Her boyfriend, who had access to several of her pictures, created a new profile of hers, along with suggestive messages, detailed sexual preferences and even listed her former boyfriends.

Testosterone-charged males on Orkut wasted no time in writing hundreds of messages to her. Friend, 29, is devastated. “I feel helpless at times,” she says. “I never expected to be betrayed.” Both she and her ex-boyfriend continue to work at the same place, but Friend says it is a matter of time before she sues him.

In the 1994 office romance thriller Disclosure, spurned female boss Demi Moore gets back at her subordinate Michael Douglas with whom she has sexual relations. In one of the most memorable exchanges, Moore asks Douglas whether he misses having sex with her. “I have my compensations,” he tells her. “Of course,” she retorts, “that's life. A series of trade-offs.” Perhaps, that’s what office romance ultimately is.