Matthew Hussey weighs workplace romance against dating elsewhere. Workplace dating offers social proof and time to build rapport, but comes with a limited pool and breakup risks. He recommends expanding your social circle through classes and friendships instead.
Welcome to Love Life. My name is Matthew Hussey. You should know that by now because you should have been listening to Love Life. It's been in the news a lot recently. All these statistics about how many people we meet in the working environment. I heard one recently that was two-thirds of people meet their partner either through friends or through work. This is being used as a backwards statistic. In other words, they're saying that because people meet or two-thirds of people meet their partner through friends or at work, That must mean that friends or work are the best places to meet people. And this is a completely backwards logic. It doesn't mean that these are the best places to meet people. It simply shows that this is where most people are meeting their partners. Now, look, let's discuss the pros and cons of meeting someone at work. The first pro of meeting someone at work is what we call social proof. In other words, because you both work in the same environment, you both have this idea that you're both all right, neither of you are crazy, you're not just someone out of the blue, you both know each other, you have a level of comfort and rapport that comes from knowing that you're both kind of stand-up people that work at this place. The second part is you know how someone reacts to situations. You know how they deal with pressure, you know how they deal with certain areas of discipline of having to show up every day and do their job. You know how good at their job they are. You know how they deal with tension, conflict. All of these things are good things to know about a potential partner. So work is kind of a crash course in getting to know your partner at least in one particular environment. The other big pro, the third one, is that you can build up rapport over time with this person instead of having, you know, if you met someone in a coffee shop today, you'd have to just approach them, start talking to them, and hope that you were gonna go from start to finish in getting their number now. At work, you can get to know someone over six months before you ever go on a date with someone, which some people prefer, because they prefer the slow burn method of building attraction. Now let's discuss some of the cons of meeting someone at work. You might work in an office where there's 10 people, you might work in an office where there's 200 people. It still isn't a lot of people, either way. So you're choosing from a very limited pool of people. This also skews our perception of how attractive someone is. It's almost like if everyone in your office is boring and unattractive and then someone walks in who's slightly charismatic and seems attractive to you, all of a sudden they seem like Brad Pitt. because you spend your life around people you don't find attractive. So someone that you would find attractive at a 6 out of 10 normally out there in the world seems like a 9 in this environment and you start trying too hard for this person even though they're not necessarily meeting your standards. The other problem of course we all know this is the idea of crapping on your own doorstep. If you suddenly start dating someone it goes wrong and now you have to go to work with this person every day, it's not going to be the most comfortable of situations for you or them. It may even create problems with your career politically. This statistic of two-thirds of us meeting our partners through work or friends really doesn't speak to me of how amazing these are as locations for meeting people. It speaks more to the insular nature of people's lives. In other words, that they spend two-thirds of their time at work and they spend the rest of their time with friends. Now, how do we increase our pool of people and still make use of these great ways of meeting people? Because if we take the premise that the good points about meeting people in these environments, is that we have social proof, is that we spend a lot of time with these people and we have this rapport with them, and is that we can speak to them every week instead of having to make it all happen at once. Let's find other ways of doing that. Well, firstly, you could increase your social circle of friends. You could increase the number of people you have in your life. Your friends shouldn't be limited to those five people that you normally hang out with. We should go out there and meet another five people this month. Increase our social circle so that even though we're still meeting people through our circle, that's not limited to five people and the people they know. It's 50 people and the people they know. Of course, those 50 people aren't all going to be best friends, but they are going to be friends that could introduce you to other people. I would argue that this is much more enjoyable and likely than being able to do three jobs because you want to increase your pool of people that you could meet in the workplace. We don't have the time for that, nor do we have the inclination. So what do you do if you have an office where you're not attracted to anyone or you don't want to cross-pollinate those two areas of your life? You increase your circle of friends or let's say you join a class. Joining a class means you can meet someone this week, you can speak to them again the next week, you can talk to them again the next week. You can still have that slow burn method that occurs when you meet someone at work. It's just not in that environment where it's difficult to leave if the relationship goes wrong. So don't buy into these statistics. Just because two-thirds of people do it that way, it doesn't make it the best way of doing it. And you can use those formulas without using those specific methods of meeting people. In other words, it doesn't have to be at work. It could be through a class. It could be through extra friends that you have. Diversify and expand your life in order to meet people. Don't contract in order to meet people because you'll very quickly be in that position where you're just another person who says they never meet anyone they're attracted to. There's no one you're interested in and you have to keep bumping into your exes all the time because all your exes are that tiny pool of people that you spend most of your time with anyway. Expand, do not contract in your love life and you will find that you're much happier and have plenty more options than the next person. Take care my friends. I'll see you soon. Come see me live on my tour. Go check it out at howtogetttheguy.com if you haven't been to one of my live events, you're gonna love it. I can promise you that. We'll get to meet person. I'll get to help you with the areas of your life you want work on. And if you haven't followed me on Facebook yet, go do that now. It's Coach Matthew Hussey. I'll see you soon.
