Dear Joely: Is He Dating Half the Office?

When a brilliant first date suddenly comes with an unexpected colleague.

New
here?

Dear Joely,

I'm 24 and work in admin for a fairly big furniture and homeware company — nice office, about 35 of us, mostly women, and we all rub along really well together. The warehouse side has more men, and we cross paths at lunch and in the canteen.

There's a floor manager there — I'll call him Norry — who everyone loves. Friendly, always up for a quick chat, and (I'll admit it) properly fanciable and funny with it. He always has me in stitches.

A couple of weeks ago he asked me for a drink and I said yes before he'd even finished the sentence. We had a brilliant night — proper flirty, talking rubbish till late, and he said a few things that made me feel like he actually saw something in me — how I dress, my sense of humour, that I "have a way about me" he can't stop thinking about.

At the end of the night we had a bit of a kiss — quite full-on, if I'm honest, and it could easily have gone further, but I held back. Didn't want to dive in headfirst. Still, I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

I've seen him at work a few times — nothing but knowing looks and a bit of teasing now, which is exciting in itself — and we've texted a little, nothing serious. I kept expecting him to ask me out properly. I know he's busy with football and part-time study, but I really felt something between us.

Then yesterday we had lunch at the pub for Annie's (from Accounts) 30th — just the office girls. I turned up about fifteen minutes late, and Annie was already passing her phone round, showing off photos from a night out. When it got to me, there they were — her and Norry, dead cosy, sat on the bonnet of his car, big smiley selfie, looking every bit the couple.

My stomach hit the floor. I put my acting face on sharpish, but inside I was gutted. Everyone was going "ooh, lucky you, he's gorgeous!" and "you'll be walking down the aisle before Christmas!" — all said in fun, obviously, but it properly stung.

Maybe I'm being daft, but I really like him. Part of me wants to just ask him outright what's going on, so at least I know where I stand. I know the sensible thing is to write it off as one nice night and move on, but my gut's telling me there's more to it than that.

Please help.

Yours,
In Bits

Dear In Bits,

I don’t think you’re being daft. I think you may have accidentally wandered into the romantic clearance section.

Let us examine Norry. Handsome, funny, universally adored, works in a building populated largely by women, knows exactly how to make you laugh, and is apparently gifted at producing compliments specific enough to make a woman feel she has been individually selected from the catalogue.

“I like how you dress.”

“I love your sense of humour.”

“You have a way about you I can’t stop thinking about.”

Very nice. Lovely finish. Available in several departments.

Because the interesting thing here isn’t simply that Annie from Accounts appears to have got her hands on Norry. It’s that Annie may be evidence that Norry has got his hands on a rather wider section of the workforce.

You had a brilliant, flirty night with him. He kissed you. He made you feel that something particular was happening between you. Then he didn’t ask you out again, despite apparently finding time to become sufficiently cosy with Annie to pose together on the bonnet of his car.

I would therefore resist the temptation to think of Annie as your romantic rival. For all you know, she’s simply one aisle further along in the same showroom.

And before anybody writes in, yes: Norry is single and perfectly entitled to date more than one woman. You and he had one date and one kiss, not a civil ceremony. The question isn’t whether he has broken some sacred covenant with you. He hasn’t.

The question is whether Norry has developed a pleasant little habit of making women at work feel uniquely chosen while keeping his options as extensive as the company’s sofa range.

You can certainly ask him what’s going on with Annie if you want to. But I’d ask calmly and then listen very carefully to the answer. Don’t tell him what answer you’re hoping for. Don’t minimise your own feelings to make things easier for him. And if the explanation requires an Allen key and twelve pages of diagrams, put your coat on.

Most importantly, don’t feel embarrassed about having believed him. You weren’t foolish. A gorgeous, funny man asked you out, paid you highly personal compliments, kissed you and continued flirting afterwards. Most reasonable people would conclude that he fancied them.

He probably does.

I’m just not entirely convinced you’re the only one.

So by all means find out where you stand. But before you invest any more heart in Norry, make sure you aren’t looking at a beautiful display model that’s already been tried out by half the showroom.

You deserve better than flat-pack romance: exciting when you first open the box, increasingly confusing once you realise there are several important pieces missing.

Yours, checking the staff discount policy,
Joely

Dear Joely: Was I Just His Wank Bank?

The memories are warm. The messages are filthy. Then she suggests meeting in real life and discovers just how little of the relationship exists outside his trousers.

New
here?

Dear Joely,

An unanswered message has hurt me a bit, and I thought you might be able to give me some perspective.

Yes, it’s a man involved.

This man is not a current lover, far from it. I am not trying to win him back, and I wasn’t expecting some grand romantic reunion at the airport.

Here it is in a nutshell.

I met him when I was about 24, living and working in Scotland. I’m in Australia now. We worked together. He was married with two young children. We fell very hard for each other, and I became the other woman.

It went on for a few years and was exactly as intoxicating and dreadful as those situations tend to be. Ecstatic highs, terrible pain, an astonishing amount of sex and not nearly enough sense. I remember being convinced that I could no sooner hold back the tide than stop loving him.

Eventually he left his marriage, but he did not leave it for me. He left me as well and began a relationship with another woman from the office. They lived together for five years. I was heartbroken for much longer than I care to admit.

But somehow we never disappeared completely from one another’s lives.

Over the next thirty-five years there were occasional calls and messages. He would bring up old moments between us, sometimes very sentimental ones, as though they still meant something to him. I listened. I gave my best advice when he went through difficult times.

We have slept together a few times since, on my rare trips back. Our connection had always been intensely sexual.

About ten years ago, I suggested meeting while on one such trip and he sent me a very harsh reply. It was so dismissive that something in me finally woke up. I stopped speaking to him for years.

Then, around five years ago, he contacted me and asked whether I was really never going to speak to him again. We began corresponding once more. Some of it was ordinary conversation, some of it reminiscing, and quite a lot of it sexual.

To be blunt, I began to wonder whether I had become little more than a sort of wank bank.

He has old and newer photographs of me. He sends sexual scenarios and dick pics. I have joined in and sent him nude photographs too, although the truth is that I wasn’t really getting much from it anymore.

I wasn’t pining for him. I wasn’t imagining a future.

I simply thought there was affection there. History. Some basic friendship after all this time.

I told him I am going to Scotland for a holiday in a few months and will be flying home from his area. I asked whether he might like to spend a couple of days together at the end of the trip. I made it easy for him. I said that if he was happily involved with someone, or it simply wasn’t appropriate, that was completely fine.

He answered the next day with a breathless little message about how lovely the trip sounded, complete with enough exclamation marks to frighten a flock of birds, but he did not acknowledge my suggestion that we meet.

Not yes. Not no. Not even, “I’ll think about it.”

He simply stepped around it and carried on.

I wasn’t expecting sex. I wasn’t expecting declarations. I wasn’t even necessarily expecting him to say yes.

I was expecting a reply. I thought he'd be pleased to see me after all this time.

I think what has upset me is that for years he has spoken about our shared past as though it mattered to him. He has recalled rooms, moments, sex, things we said and things we did. He has accepted my listening, my advice, my photographs and my availability. He has behaved as though there is some tenderness attached to that history.

Yet when I appeared in the present as an actual person, asking for nothing more than a courteous answer, he vanished.

It feels awful. Worse, it feels familiar.

Not because I am still in love with him. I’m not.

It feels awful because I thought that after thirty-five years we had become old friends. Or, at the very least, two people who had once meant enough to each other to warrant basic respect.

Am I making too much of an unanswered message?

Or have I finally understood that he is sentimental about the memories, but not especially concerned with the woman who lived them?

Yours,
Closing an Account

Dear Closing an Account,

You are not upset because he did not agree to see you. You are upset because he could not bring himself to answer you plainly.

That distinction matters.

For years, he has revisited the history between you. He has remembered the sex, the rooms, the private moments and the woman who once loved him beyond reason. He has accepted your photographs, your attention, your advice and your willingness to enter his fantasies. This has apparently required no shortage of enthusiasm on his part.

Yet the moment you asked him to meet you in real life, he became strangely short of words.

There is something shabby about a man who can summon the energy to maintain a wank bank but not the manners to acknowledge the account holder.

He may insist, if challenged, that the memories meant something to him. Perhaps they did. But sentiment is very easy when it asks nothing of us. It can survive for decades on reminiscence, fantasy and selective tenderness. Ask it to do something as ordinary as answer an invitation and suddenly the whole structure begins to wobble.

That is because nostalgia can imitate intimacy for a very long time.

You thought the two of you had become old friends. He appears to have thought he had retained access to an old lover.

Those are not the same arrangement.

The unanswered message was not the wound. It was the diagnosis.

Never mistake someone’s ability to remember you for their willingness to show up for you. They are entirely different talents.

He has shown a considerable gift for the first and very little appetite for the second.

Do not ask again. Do not send a wounded follow-up. Do not explain why his response hurt you. Do not provide him with another opportunity to turn your perfectly reasonable expectation into an emotional discussion he can avoid, minimise or eroticise.

And when he next returns with a sentimental memory in one hand and his trousers unfastened with the other, do not confuse the performance with affection.

The house of cards has already fallen. You are simply no longer obliged to crawl underneath it looking for friendship.

Yours, in closed accounts and considerably better investments,
Joely