The Time You Dated Someone From Work

Remember anything before Wednesday? I mostly don’t, but I do have one hazy memory: photos of One Direction heartthrob Harry Styles and actor/director Olivia Wilde holding hands at Styles’s manager’s Jeff Azoff’s quarantine wedding, which surfaced on Monday sparking dating rumors. She and fiancé Jason Sudeikis ended their seven-year engagement early in 2020, and for the last few months, Styles and Wilde have been working together on the set of her forthcoming film, Don’t Worry Darling. Their partnership makes sense—though, if they did get together on the job, she was technically his boss.

Anyway, this made me think of the nature of workplace romances, which are usually ill-advised but also get into dicey HR territory, unless you are an actor, apparently. I do not mean unethical tales of your piece of shit boss flirting with you while you were an intern; anything mutually consensual goes. Personally, I’ve never had one, because I think coworkers are gross, but if my coworker were Harry Styles, I’d change my tune.

This week, I want to hear all about the time you hooked up with a colleague: Did you meet your significant other on the job? Did you wait until you got a new gig to make a move? Was hooking up with another summer camp counselor the worst decision you made sophomore year of high school? Let us know in the comments below.

Before all that, let’s take a look at last week’s (last year’s!) winners: these are your most magical New Year’s Eve stories:

FilthyHarry, you absolutely win, what the fuck!!!!!!!!!:

When I was a kid, don’t recall the exact year, (but I remember we were watching Solid Gold as the New Year’s show, so 80-82?) and we were at a party at our neighbors apt in our building.

Close to midnight, Harper Lee (who lived in our building) showed up at the front door of the apt and exclaimed in her exquisite drawl, if we didn’t keep it down, she’d buy the building and have us all thrown out.

BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind, if you’re happy, we’re happy:

A few years ago on NYE, my wife and I decided to call it quits. Best resolution I’ve ever made, and just about the only one that ever stuck.

ninjagin, this is great:

My very best NYE was when I was 19, the first New Year’s after I’d left home… about 35 years ago, let’s say. I was living in a room downtown, doing community theater, writingand hanging around with poets and artists and actors and musicians in my cow-town city… it was a small scene, but comfortable. You’d pretty much run into someone you knew at just about every gig or gallery show or reading or whatever. I was selling clothing at the time, working as a haberdasher, so I had a nice suit to wear. Got invited to the party that happened to be in a pair of adjoining suites at a hotel down in my old stomping ground. I knew the area well, took a bus out there, arrived more or less on-time as things got rolling.

I’m not going to go into the details, but it was full-on debauch. An artist friend there gave me some [redacted] and I’d never had it before but it was really great. There was dancing and drinking and great philosophical conversations and smoking and stuffing my [redacted] full of [redacted] and just hanging out with a bunch of wild young sexy creatives until the early morning hours. We played around with lasers (which were expensive and big and bulky back then – remember LazerFloyd or Lazerium?) and painted murals with glow-in-the-dark paints and danced and sang and made wild artworks with wax and cardboard and glittery paints. Got a big kiss at midnight from someone. It was like a wrap party without the underlying sadness, but flipped around like it might be if you had the wrap party at the start of the run? … where all the good stuff was yet to come? Then, predictably, most everyone started to pass out within an hour or so and I knew it was time to go. I caught a cab, which the city had sponsored for free.

I got home a couple hours before dawn and slept for most of the next day. It was great. Nobody to bitch at me about how late I’d been out, nobody to wag a finger at me for partying and enjoying myself with my friends, nobody to give me grief about smoking and drinking and stuffing my [redacted] full of [redacted]. I’ve never felt so free and wild and happy in my own skin as I was that night… and I looked like a million dollars. I regret none of it.

Fast forward to the present and I’m not young and sexy anymore, my knees and feet hurt too much to dance, and I don’t dress anywhere near that level anymore… not even in the same building, really. A single cigarette will beat me up for days afterwards and I pretty much don’t drink anymore. On school nights I’m in bed by 10. Yet, I do know how to party like it’s 1985, dammit, even though I wouldn’t want to anymore. Ah, to be young and wild and free, when a new year meant a whole universe of change and creativity and opportunity. It was awesome and I was right in the middle of it and I’ll never forget it.

chainsawpants, hell yeah:

I scored a very very lucky housesitting gig over the 99/00 holidays in London. It was spectacular. Unfortunately, I tripped on Christmas Eve and knocked my two front teeth out (even I found the “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” thing funny). On New Year’s Eve a guy I met on the flight over set me up with his dentist for a free fix (essentially a piece of grey plastic melted to the stumps left in my mouth). So I had almost teeth! I was in London! I partied outside Big Ben! I met an Irish arborist and made out! I was a fake tooth star!

I stopped new years after that. Cannot be topped.

Samantha Stevens, excuse me?:

I went to a party with my boyfriend at in a building that rented rehearsal space. As usual, as soon as we got there, my boyfriend split for the bar and I didn’t see him again. I ended up spending most of the party in a big chair drinking Haitian rum with a dude that I had a huge crush on (who also happened to be Madonna’s boyfriend). Yes, it was quite a few years ago.