Why You Fancy Your Colleague

There is a particular kind of Tuesday morning when you realise that you have spent an unreasonable amount of mental energy thinking about someone whose primary contribution to your life, until recently, was forwarding you a spreadsheet with the subject line "FYI".

You are not having an affair. You have not declared anything. You have not, technically speaking, done anything wrong. But you have become aware—with the sort of creeping unease usually reserved for discovering you've been replying-all to the entire organisation—that a colleague has become considerably more interesting than the organisational chart strictly requires.

This is not a book about how to conduct an office romance. It is not a manual for infidelity, a guide to flirting past the photocopier, or a defence of regrettable behaviour at the Christmas party. If you were hoping for any of those things, I'm afraid you've been mis-sold.

This is a book about something both more ordinary and more interesting: why human beings, who arrive at work ostensibly to contribute to quarterly targets and attend meetings that could have been emails, keep discovering that they have also brought along desire, longing, jealousy, insecurity, the need to be noticed, and a quite spectacular ability to convince themselves that the person in Finance is unusually perceptive.

We like to imagine that we show up to the office as rational professional units. We do not. We show up as whole people. Unfortunately.

The Question Behind the Question

The question this book asks is not simply: "Why do I fancy this person?" That question, while urgent at 3 a.m., is not particularly illuminating. The more interesting question is: "What does my attraction to this person reveal about me?"

Because desire, it turns out, is information.

Not instruction. Information.

It tells us something about what we notice, what we value, what we think we lack, what we imagine we could become, and what we believe would make us feel more fully alive. Sometimes it tells us we're lonely. Sometimes it tells us we're bored. Sometimes it tells us we've stopped paying attention to the life we already have. And sometimes—occasionally—it tells us that someone is genuinely rather marvellous and we've noticed.

The difficulty is learning which is which.

This book argues that sexual attraction is not an embarrassing interruption to adult life. It is one particularly revealing expression of a much larger human longing to be seen, valued, recognised, chosen and connected. The workplace simply happens to be an especially efficient laboratory for producing it, because it combines proximity, competence, shared goals, professional presentation and the opportunity to be admired by people who have not yet seen you trying to assemble flat-pack furniture.

What We'll Explore

We will explore why offices manufacture crushes with such efficiency. We will ask whether you actually fancy the person or merely fancy yourself around them. We will examine why being noticed can feel so intoxicating, why status is weirdly sexy, and why professional jealousy and romantic jealousy are more closely related than the HR handbook admits.

We will also—and this matters—talk seriously about marriage and long-term relationships. Because one of the more disorienting discoveries of adult life is that you can be deeply, genuinely, lastingly in love with someone and still find that your attention occasionally wanders towards a colleague who has never seen you unblock a sink. This does not mean your marriage is failing. It means you are human. What you do with that information is where maturity begins.

We will draw on psychology, philosophy, theology and the accumulated wisdom of people who have spent centuries trying to understand why humans want things, and what our wanting reveals. Not because ancient texts have all the answers, but because the question "Why do I feel like this?" is older than the office, older than email, and considerably older than the away-day.

Better Questions, Not a Formula

By the end, you should understand not only why colleagues become attractive, but what desire itself is trying to tell you about recognition, identity, projection, status, longing and the complicated business of becoming a person who can want wisely.

You will not emerge with a formula. You will emerge with better questions.

And if you're very lucky, you'll stop thinking quite so much about the person from Finance.