Saw this article from Forbes in my Linked in feed. It gives some data about office affairs and relationships.

Particular highlights include -

  • More than half of employees have engaged in an office romance.
  • Almost one in five employees who were in a committed relationship have had an affair with a colleague.
  • A whopping 18% of employees reported having a random hookup with a coworker.
  • Almost three in four (72%) would participate in an office romance again if given the chance.

The big one for us is the 2nd bullet point. 1 in 5 people in a committed relationship had an affair. If I gave you 20% odds, you'd most likely be fine, but the odds of the miss aren't insignificant. For context, psychology today has rates at 20-25% for men vs. 10-15% for women - so the numbers line up well.

Remember these numbers are over time, so we're talking about integration of all experiences, not a single time window calculation. This just means that any given time, the chances of this being true is much less than 1 in 5.

The analysis behind the article is more of a HR-based assessment instead of human psychology. It makes a lot of sense why people would be so open to office romances. These factors include:

  • Alignment in Socioeconomic Status - the people you work with are general at your level in terms of income and values, completely different than the bars or online dating
  • Alignment in Education/Attainment Levels - the people you work have similar levels of education, skill sets, capabilities, and mindsets.
  • General exposure and constant relationship building - we spend 1/3 of our lives with the people we work with. that means there's probably more time to build relationship with co-workers than with your wife.

And finally, work relationships are a fun, novel fantasy. It's not a day-to-day grind. Which begs the question - if your relationships can be described as a "day-to-day grind", what are you actually doing?

Edit: I just wanted to share this incel's comment on this very interesting topic du jour.