At nearly every workplace, you may come across already married employees carrying on extramarital relations and secretly exchanging glances. Extramarital relationships and workplace romance are more common than one may think.
On average, co-workers spend 8-10 hours a day together. These long hours spent together have two simultaneous effects; the individuals tend to get to know each other very well and they often have little time to spend with their significant others outside of work. The co-workers may find themselves slowly bonding over shared goals and, with the smallest spark between them, end up walking towards infidelity without even realizing it. Seems like a bit of a leap, doesn’t it? However, there may be a multitude of factors working behind the scenes that push the two people towards a more intimate, extramarital relationship.
In many workplaces, extramarital affairs may begin when the individual(s) is experiencing dissatisfaction in their relationship or in their life in general, and use the affair to add spice to their mundane routines. However, extramarital affairs are rarely solutions for the problems that lead to them. Once the initial excitement of a ‘forbidden love’ wears off, the individual(s) often find themselves mentally stressed from the balancing act of lies, guilt and conflict that they are constantly dealing with. This stress tends to build up as the affair goes on. The emotional strain that the individual(s) is under can impact their work performance, their partner, their lover and could potentially impact the person’s entire career. This could happen if a superior found that the affair was in violation of the company policies and had to fire them or if the affair ended badly and the disgruntled lover sought revenge by reporting the other to HR.
While these sound like events that would occur in a movie, they are very real potential outcomes to an extramarital affair at the workplace. These effects could leave behind even messier situations when one of the individuals involved is the subordinate of the other. This could result in the achievements of the subordinate be undermined due to the relationship, or the subordinate being mistreated in an attempt by the superior to eradicate any partiality in their decisions.
