Being on Dating Apps was the lousiest thing I’ve ever had to go through in my entire life – and that’s considering immigration, being culturally torn and restricted as a teenager, using my trauma as an excuse to stay in a 6-year-emotionally-abusive-marriage, and paying RIDICULOUS amounts of money to rent a tiiiiiny bedroom in Downtown Toronto.
Yup – having to come up with an original Dating App bio still sucks more.
On dating Apps, every single swipe that blossoms into a date is like buying a losing lottery ticket – if you had to spend HOURS shaving, tweezing, plucking, painting, hiding, accentuating, elongating, and highlighting yourself to be a presentable ticket holder. And then you have to make your losing ticket laugh, be charming, be sexy (but not too sexy), and re-wear that little red dress in every single loud, dim and EXPENSIVE bar in downtown Toronto, only to get royally disappointed at your ticket for being rude to the server, or even worse, to disappear without a trace to be found.
So if it’s about gambling your feelings and self-worth away, why not invest in something a little more tangible? Like someone you don’t have to make 20% less attractive to guesstimate what they looks like in real life, and who have most likely gone through the same police check, background check, and who earn a paycheck – similar to yourself!
The goal is to find the “Jim” to your “Pam” anyway – as 1 in every 3 dating profiles suggest – (which by the way, is such a weird thing to write on your dating App bio because Jim and Pam didn’t meet on a Dating App! They have a deep, mutual connection based on respect, humor and friendship, as well as a shared hatred of working for a boring-ass paper company).
Watching years of work-place comedies (special shout outs to Brooklyn Nine Nine, The Office, & The Mindy Project) have taught me that no chemistry is stronger, and no romance is greater than the one between coworkers who are young, hot and single and who exchange sexually charged banter all daaaaay long.
Is dating someone at work a good idea? I don’t know. I am literally not an expert in ANYTHING – (seriously, not even in what I do professionally.)
But if you are considering dating a coworker, it’s important to be open and honest with your intentions – this ain’t Bumble: it’s impossible to ghost someone you work in the same building as – the more awkward the interactions, the higher the chance of sharing an elevator with them – it’s science!
While dating someone at work might instill a little flicker of light inside of you that not all romance is dead, I STRONGLY advise against hooking up with people at work (and as previously mentioned I’m not even an expert, so it must be a horrible idea if a noob is warning you against it!).
So your intentions better be pure as fuck, because if you just want to bone then please just use Tinder – that’s literally why it was invented.
I’ll just assume we’re all adults here and we’ve read the fine print when signing our lives away to the big corporations we’re chained to- you can’t actually date anyone within your immediate team, ESPECIALLY if it’s a manager/employee relationship. Keep that shit professional and occasionally take shots* with your boss at happy hour while there are other people around- but never take it any further than that (*preferably vodka shots over Tequila shots)
Make sure the person you’re crushing on is single and on the same page (but hopefully on a different floor).
It helps to have a dating blog – but if you don’t, just casually mention that you’re single (without sounding too desperate) and how you’re living your best life (but don’t make it sound better than it actually is – again, that would be crossing into the Dating App territory).
The first time my boyfriend and I conversed, I was proudly telling a group of work friends about my 3rd date with the writer (we all remember how that ended… it was a write-off), while he told the same group of work friends that he was taking care of his ex- girlfriend’s cats. Cool – if the writer is a piece of shit (which thankfully he was!), then there’s a chance that my heart could belong to this cute guy with a Kiwi accent who doesn’t seem to have commitment issues and is empathetic towards animals – at this point, my bar was literally low enough to date an aspiring serial killer who lived in his parents’ basement – so this seemed like a pretty sweet deal.
If you’re dating a coworker, it’s crucial to have conversations about boundaries and to keep your relationship private at work until you are certain about where you stand, or if you decide to become exclusive.
Last but not least, try to take things at their own pace – don’t forcefully speed up or even slow down the process. If it feels right, then things will fall into place in the most beautiful way possible and you’ll both be the happiest you’ve been in a loooooooong time – which may affect the number of blog entries you’ve been posting lately, but it’s OK because he makes your heart as happy as when you write, and you love him as much as you love (most) bread!
The Married Girl On Bumble 