"Nothing sexy happens on Slack."
Feed Me readers love office sex! 💼❤️🔥🍌
Yesterday, I wrote about a study that said 50% of people currently have a work crush. All around the office, managers, direct reports, CEOs and peers are spending some untold portion of company time daydreaming about or flirting with each other. When I posted about this on my Instagram Story, a flood of DMs from strangers started sharing their office romance stories with me, so I decided to run an anonymous survey about how and why people engage in something so risky, and got hundreds of remarkably vulnerable, albeit anonymous, responses.
There were a few clear themes in the results:
Office parties (specifically holiday ones) are a huge catalyst for these affairs. Recent holiday parties I’ve been to are remarkably boring, sober, and short. People have kids! Workouts in the morning! Need to clock in the sleep hours on their Oura ring!
There was a surprising balance between cautionary tales (damaged career, mental breakdowns) and love stories (several-year relationships, marriages).
Yearning was a word that came up over and over in these responses (and it happens to be a word that super-online people love right now). I once had an analyst (psych not financial) tell me that I had an “endless, insatiable wish” so I know all about yearning. I found myself getting quite affected while reading these. Dozens of responders sound like they’re mourning a life before COVID – one where they passed envelopes in the office, and had harmless crushes, and gossiped in the stairwell, and generally sounded more emotionally creative. One person summed this up by saying, “The office fantasy is supreme. I pity those who won’t ever get to experience that type of clandestine excitement.”
Coworkers – especially in demanding offices – are a group of people who we spend ten hours a day with (sometimes more than our families) and we still try to hide a wide range of our emotions from them, which can then exacerbate feelings for another person. It’s an unusually pressurized situation, but I am glad I got to experience a traditional office and the flings that came with it (mostly men, mostly not acted on, always better when not acted on).
To quote Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Malcom, in Jurassic Park, “Life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands throughout territories and crashes through barriers.” Whether we’re in an office, or at home, or in the metaverse, people will always find a way to adapt.. and have sex with each other.
News today includes:
Andy Baraghani’s wedding
Heated New York literary world drama
A surprising interview with Woody Allen
NEWS:
Allbirds is, unsurprisingly, in trouble. Stocks are traded on exchanges – marketplaces with rules. A metaphor: Spotify is a marketplace with rules (they can take your song down for copyright infringement), so is the Apple app store (they can take your app down if it hasn’t been updated for years). And so are stock exchanges. If your stock falls below a certain price ($1 for more than ten days in this case), you can be delisted. If they CAN’T get it together, it doesn’t mean the stock can’t trade over the counter, but it’s harder to trade. The downfall of Allbirds was their corny vibe at the end. You don’t want to be the Sweetgreen shoe.
Theaters are one of the few areas of retail real estate where landlords don’t have the upper hand right now. Have you ever looked at the way those places are broken down? What are you going to do, make a weird slanted restaurant in a dark room? With different themes in each room?? A number of movie-theater operators are investing in their cinemas to make them more exciting places to watch a film than the living-room couch, installing giant screens, playgrounds for children and cocktail lounges for adults. Not to make this about me, but I have been getting drinks at the Metrograph quite frequently lately and it is a pretty cool revenue stream for them.
Women are 40% more unfaithful than 35 years ago. “They are better at it. They are cooler and less clumsy than men about keeping secrets. And we now know that the last year of each decade from the age of 29 — so 29, 39, all the way to 69 — is when people most want to have an affair.”