TOO BROKE FOR WORKPLACE FLINGS: OFFICE ENTANGLEMENTS NOT WORTH THE RISK

The desire to find love is something that seems to be ingrained in our human DNA, but despite the universal need for love and affection, dating, in whatever day or age, is a hard quest.

Thankfully for younger generations, love can be more easily found and can be as close as the tip of your fingers. This also means that old-fashioned, love at a coffee shop types of chance encounters are waning.

One popular, but old-fashioned place where romance has fizzled out is at the workplace. Due to the pandemic, a lot of companies are opting for remote work positions making the dating game at work basically nonexistent, and this is especially true for millennials, who before the pandemic had already rejected the idea of mixing work with pleasure.

According to an article by the Wall Street Journal, dating at the workplace was out of the question even before the pandemic for those millennials incoming into the workforce simply because it isn’t worth risking their job considering how the economy and job market are doing.

We know that older millennials were deeply affected in their job prospects after the recession of 2008, and no work fling is worth the risk of having to find a new job in an already limited market.

For those younger millennials, allegations of sexual misconduct in professional settings highlighted by the MeToo movement have discouraged any sort of entanglements at work. Workers have become cautious of walking the thin line of flirtation and harassment a lot more these days. Companies have also started to include policies regarding relationship disclosures, so-called “love contracts,’’ according to the WSJ.

A study by Stanford University noted that workplace romance had been on a decline dropping from 19 percent to 11 percent from 1995 to 2017, which can also be attributed to the rise of dating apps.

Dating in the age of technology seems like a godsend, especially during the pandemic, and makes finding love, a fling, romance or whatever a whole lot easier with a vast variety of options not limited to the work space. 

Despite one less place to find love, the workplace isn’t much of a great loss for potential love considering the monetary risk being taken in these broke times.