, but find I can't keep it up for long. Swashbuckling and courtly love are not my thing, apparently. Pity: I enjoyed The Count of Monte Cristo
thoroughly.So I've been reflecting since coffee yesterday on whether this wsj article on office romance is depressing or heartening. For Office Romance, the Secret's Out details the new acceptability of office love. On the one hand, given that most of us do not have anything so elegant as a career, but only a job --ugh!-- this is depressing:
"People spend so much of their time working that it's unavoidable,"On the other hand, especially following on the heels of Charlotte Allen's truly horrific "New Dating Game," in which the young women behave like Moll Flanders, only without the charming economic and status motives (you wish their behavior could rise to the level of whoring), the experience of this couple seems wholesome and refreshing.
After meeting—and mindful of the risks of office romance—they took several months to get acquainted before they started dating. "We had a true courting, where we had to sit on the front porch and just talk to each other" online and by phone, says Ms. Gudeman. Eventually she transferred to his office, where the pair worked side-by-side for another year.And this appears to be a pattern:
many young office daters are taking things slowly—reverting to painstaking relationship-building because they know their livelihoods are at risk. "People have this notion that these relationships are scuzzy meetings in the supply closet, or Christmas-party affairs. In fact, it's just the opposite," the author Ms. Olen says. "The office has become the last bastion of old-fashioned courting."Hmm. So it appears that people need an institution which introduces persons with common interests and mores to one another while imposing certain standards of behavior that allow the relationship to develop fully or cool before much damage is done. Imagine! As "the boss" is the last person whose right to make demands on and have expectations of us is still acknowledged, he turns out to be the stand-in for parents, the Church, and stern-eyed maiden aunts.
I can't decide whether to be grateful or extremely depressed.
