You Need To Treat Employment Like A Romantic Relationship
Or, why people grossly underestimate how much your job is akin to a relationship.
Abeni* had called my husband in tears. She was distressed and, if we’re going to be honest, in a shape I had never seen her before. You see, Abeni was my husband’s coworker-turned-friend and she made the mistake of returning to an extremely toxic job.
“Steve, put it on speakerphone, please,” she said. “I need both of you to talk to me. I am very scared and I don’t know what to do.”
The moment she got put on speakerphone, she started to pace and talk rapidly about the state of her job. Long story short, her employer was paying her below minimum wage and claiming that it was “a favor” since she was an immigrant.
Abeni had been considering calling the labor board on her boss, but she didn’t want to. She explained, “You know, he never really says anything bad to me. He makes us feel like we’re a family there. I don’t know if I have it in me to even try to get better”
“You know, you sound very gaslit,” said my husband. He would know, he’s had a gaslight-y boss who made him question his worth.
“But I’m also friends with the boss’s family,” she explained. “My family knows him. I feel like his family would never talk to me again if I say something.”
Abeni sounded like she was in an abusive relationship, because she was.
Abeni is not a dumb woman. She is going to school for STEM. She can finagle and finesse with the best of them. If you give her chicken shit, she can turn it into chicken salad. She came from Lagos here as one of the top of her class.
And yet, she found herself doubting her intelligence on a daily basis. She felt too tired to actually pursue finding a job in her chosen field after a day of work. After a while, she felt emotionally responsible for her boss’s success.
“I keep hoping things will change, but they never do,” she said. “How can I make him change? How can I make him see that it’s hard for me to afford food? I’m here legally and it’s so hard because people still don’t want to hire me.”
We both had to sit her down and explain to her that she was being abused by her boss—not romantically, but in an employer-employee sense. What was happening to her was illegal and also just plain financially abusive.
Many people do not realize that employment is a form of relationship.
When we think of relationships, we think of the people who we date, our friends, and even our family members. However, our relationship with work is also a thing—and so is our relationship with our workplaces.
As an American, I don’t have to tell you that toxic workplaces are fairly common. Corporations are designed to make as much money as possible, regardless of the effects it may have on society and their workers.
Pair that with a greedy or abusive boss on a power trip, and you may experience a lot of abuse at work. In my own career, I experienced:
Gaslighting
Sexual abuse
Verbal abuse
Financial abuse
Triangulation
Reactive abuse
These are all types of abuse that people associate with a bad lover or a bad friendship. However, we often overlook those same types of abuse when it comes to employers because it never really registers that we have relationships with our employers.
A major lifehack I learned the hard way is to treat employment like a romantic relationship.
Think about it. Both romantic relationships and employer relationships have a lot in common that we tend to overlook as a society:
Both types of relationships start with a courtship phase. In romance, we court by dating. In the career world, we court by doing job interviews. Courting is basically “sniffing each other out” to see if pursuing a relationship makes sense.
Both types of relationships require vetting. Would you marry a drunk person you just met at a bar? No? Cool. You are probably vetting your dates a bit. Employers vet you by doing background and social media checks. You…are you vetting potential employers by searching them up online? You should.
Both can be life-changing in a good way. A great job can change your life for the better and also help you evolve as a person. The same can be said of a great romantic partner.
Both can result in trauma. I’m legit traumatized by my last major office job. My husband had to take literal months of recovery before he actually started to feel confident in himself after walking off his last job.
Both types of relationships can make you feel personally responsible for the well-being of others. Sometimes, in romantic relationships, this is warranted. However, in work relationships, this is rarely ever truly the case.
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