Relationships Archives - Page 3 of 14

Vocabulary of the Line

American English has many phrases for keeping work and private life apart.

Keep it professional. Leave personal feelings and private matters out of work.

Leave it at the door. Do not bring personal problems into work.

Personal day. A day off for private reasons that you do not need to explain.

Don’t mix business with pleasure. Keep work and private life, especially romance, apart.

Don’t dip your pen in the company ink. Do not date coworkers.

Personal stuff. Private matters you do not want to explain at work.

Dooced. Fired because of something you wrote in public, such as a blog post. The blogger Heather Armstrong coined the word in 2002.

In Parks and Recreation (NBC), Ron Swanson is the boss of the Pawnee parks department. In the episode “Practice Date” (season 2, first aired October 8, 2009), the staff play a game of digging up secrets about each other. Tom goes to an out-of-town bar to meet Ron’s “old friend” Duke Silver.

Duke Silver turns out to be Ron himself. Ron “secretly plays saxophone in a jazz club.” When he learns that Tom knows, he immediately calls a truce in the game to keep his secret from getting out.

No More Jokes

In The Office episode “Sexual Harassment” (NBC, season 2, first aired September 27, 2005), Toby Flenderson from HR tells Michael Scott that he will review the company’s sexual harassment policies. Michael sees the review as a threat to his easygoing office. He angrily announces that he can no longer be friends with his staff. He also says he will never tell another joke again.

Hidden from the Team

In February 2026 the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) published a survey of 1,243 employed U.S. workers. Forty-seven percent said they are or have been in a workplace romance. Fifty-six percent said they had hidden at least one relationship from their team. Forty-nine percent had hidden one from their managers, and 45 percent from HR.

Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., of SHRM said, “Let’s face it – workplace romances aren’t going anywhere.”

When Sharing Hurts

“I see a therapist and this is usually the time I go each week.” This was one of the disclosures used in a study by Kerry Roberts Gibson, Dana Harari and Jennifer Carson Marr. They published it in 2018 in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Across three lab experiments with 762 participants, higher-status people who disclosed a weakness suffered what the researchers called a “status penalty.”

Peers who disclosed the same kind of weakness did not pay this price. The University of Maryland’s business school summarized the research under the headline “Avoid Oversharing at Work.”

An Intensely Private Person

In January 2018 a reader wrote to Alison Green’s advice column Ask a Manager. “I’m an intensely private person,” the reader said. “My immediate supervisor once asked me point blank what my family member’s diagnosis was.” Coworkers had also felt slighted that the reader did not share more.

Green defended the reader’s privacy. “Workplaces aren’t families,” she wrote. “You definitely don’t need to do it with colleagues.” She also warned that “it can get weird and uncomfortable when everyone else in your office is a sharer and you’re not.” She offered a friendly line to use instead: “It’s a nice break to just be able to focus on work when I’m here!”

Vulnerability Minus Boundaries

In 2021 Brené Brown spoke about vulnerability at work on Adam Grant’s TED podcast WorkLife. “Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability,” she said. She tells people to ask themselves a question: “Are you sharing your emotions and your experiences to move your work, connection or relationship forward?” Working through private problems with a colleague is something else. “Work is not a place to do that.”

Some of the most vulnerable and authentic leaders she has worked with, she said, “personally disclose very little.” For hard times she suggested a short script: “I’m really struggling right now. I’ve got some stuff going on and it’s hard, and I wanted y’all to know.” In the script, support means “being able to bring it up with you when it’s helpful for me but not having to field a lot of questions about it.”

No Politics at Work

On September 27, 2020, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that Coinbase was a “mission focused company.” It would stay out of outside issues: “We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.” Employees uncomfortable with the policy could leave with a severance package. About 60 of roughly 1,200 employees took it.

On April 26, 2021, Jason Fried, CEO of the software company Basecamp, posted: “No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.” He wrote, “You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target.” According to The Verge, 18 of Basecamp’s 57 employees took severance.

About a week later, Fried apologized. “Last week was terrible,” he wrote.

Best Buddies

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia served together on the Supreme Court. After Scalia died, Ginsburg released a statement on February 14, 2016. She recalled their earlier years together on the D.C. Circuit: “we were best buddies.” She also wrote, “We disagreed now and then.”

Their disagreements made her work better. When she wrote for the majority and received a Scalia dissent, her final opinion was “notably better” than her draft. He “nailed all the weak spots” and “gave me just what I needed.”