Love Among the Cubicles

It's dangerous, but is it also fun?

Caution: Bad advice ahead! Image by Freepik

AdviceObsessed has often suspected a lot of advice columnists aren’t really trying to solve people’s problems. What they’re trying to do is entertain their readers.

This is an excellent approach when the letters they’re answering are silly, and the columnist is a wit. It’s different, though, when someone sends in a serious problem.

The column we’ll tackle today is about a super-serious problem. It’s called “I Have a Gigantic Crush on My Co-worker,” and it was written for New York’s “Going Through It” by Allison P. Davis.

The letter-writer is in love with her co-worker. When she started the job, she writes, “it became immediately clear we had a ton in common and speak the same language.” Also right from the start there was “something more than friendship” between them, which she describes as “subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — flirtation.”

She calls this “an emotional affair” and an “all consuming” crush, and she calls it love. The trouble is, while both of them are flirting, he’s in a ten-year relationship he doesn’t plan to leave.

“I’ve fallen hard and have to see him every bloody day,” says the LW. “Help!”

Unfortunately, Allison doesn’t help. She advises the LW to “passionately [lean] into this crush, because having a crush is thrilling. It’s a reminder that you’re alive and full of feelings and desire.”

She writes: ”Develop a work crush, and all of a sudden your life has been injected with fantasies and fun delusions!”

I could let “fun delusions” speak for itself, but I’ll go on.

The LW feels intensely for this man, but clearly, Allison doesn’t see that. How she manages to miss clues like “love” and “all-consuming” is beyond me, but she does.

Let’s talk about crushes like the LW’s. Over the years, I’ve known lots of women with hopeless crushes, and I had a few myself, back in the day. Women mired in unreciprocated love talk to their friends, so I draw on a significant data-base when I say not one of these crushes—not my own, or anyone else’s—has ever been the slightest bit amusing.

The outcome for the LW, if she takes Allison’s dreadful advice, will be more pain. The LW is already in danger of becoming the other woman, not just in a flirtation or emotional affair, but in a real-life affair. If she and her fellow flirt find themselves alone, and they’re both drinking, the affair is almost inevitable.

Does Allison think affairs, too, are harmless fun? They’re not, and the one who’ll have the least fun in this affair is the LW herself. Her love object will have his ten-year relationship to go home to, whereas every moment she’s not with him, she’ll be alone.

To avoid this outcome, the LW needs to shut this crush down. Cheerful, pleasant, and firm must be her MO. When he starts talking about anything but the office, she needs to excuse herself. When the flirting starts—when he tosses that tempting ball in her direction—she needs to let it fall, and walk away.

Married people do this all the time, if they want to stay married. Office flirts don’t stop cropping up just because you’re wearing a ring.

Allison actually mentions the LW could ”do some sort of inner work to eradicate your crush feelings.” She rejects this, though, as “Boo, boring.” Really. I couldn’t possibly make this up.

AdviceObsessed strongly suggests the LW start pulling back now, before this all-consuming crush consumes any more of her life. She didn’t mention her long-term goals, but if they include marriage and a family, her feelings for this man could hold her down for years, undermining her chances of falling in love with someone plausible, because no one else will ever be quite as perfect as Mr. Wonderful at the office.

That leaves us with the mystery of Allison. The woman who wrote to her is unhappy, and asked for help, and Allison’s advice is not only nonsense, it’s destructive, too. Let’s hope the LW has a few other advisers. This one has dangerously let her down.

For more on serious problems that generate terrible advice, check out one of my most-read posts of all time: “We’re Having Another Girl. My Husband Just Asked Me to Do the Unthinkable”...