‘A little business flirting, I thought I could easily afford it’

Marco (40): ‘When I fell in love fifteen years ago with the woman I would marry a few years later, the air was suddenly pregnant with expectation and meaning. Colors were more intense, experiences were devoid of chance and indifference and when she looked at me it was as if she saw through everything I had always successfully hidden with one glance. She wasn’t my first encounter with love, but it was the most intense. Every hour we spent together breathed the certainty of a great shared future. We didn’t know what awaited us, but we did know that the days, weeks and years to come would be fantastic, because we were together.

I proposed to her on my knees in a park in Paris. I would have preferred to take my suitcases to town hall and then go on a world tour together, but she wanted a big party, so that was it. Now, fifteen years later, we have three children and are still very happy. But the days are no longer characterized by that amazement of those early days.

Satisfaction

The feeling of being on the eve of a great promise has given way to contentment. The unbridled, unfocused energy with which we asked each other the whole thing, has turned into a calm knowing where one word is enough. That’s right, and yet, if there were a time machine I would immediately be transported to 2007, the year when everything was still possible and we thought we were untouchable. That is my greatest desire, to feel as I did then.

And now I got to know a colleague thirteen years younger who reminds me in her whole being of my wife from then. I’ve known her for two years, but it’s only been the last year that we’ve worked closely together, and when she struggled with her parents’ divorce, I naturally became that older colleague she could vent her heart to. I warned her because she seemed on the brink of burnout, I recognized the symptoms, I told her my wife had had the same.

Easy scoring

With imperceptible small steps, through conversations in our office that we shared with five other colleagues, over the coffee machine and during lunch, the confidentiality grew. It wasn’t even in what we said to each other, but in the meaning we both attached to our chats. The shared trust made our working relationship exclusive, almost elevated above contact with other colleagues.

Sometimes we would go out at lunchtime, take a walk, or have lunch on a terrace, and little by little she became more candid. She talked about the problems with her boyfriend who didn’t want to get married and didn’t want children either. He also had trouble giving compliments. I noticed she was impressed with me. With my romantic marriage proposal, my good marriage and my children, my interest in others, I became the example of how it could be. But I also knew I had to be careful, because of course it was easy to score with a young, troubled 29-year-old woman.

Sometimes when we talked we would lean over and our sleeves would touch or our hands, but as long as we didn’t pay attention to it, it didn’t exist. She laughed impishly at our age difference, as if it didn’t exist. A bit of business flirting, that was it and I thought I could easily afford it, because my home situation was stable enough not to let my head spin. But when her boyfriend went to work abroad for a few months and she came back completely happy and in love after her visit, I suddenly felt a little jealous, as if I had lost my mind. It took me a day or two to identify my disappointment, and I understood that I had gone too far in my feelings.

Glances of Recognition

I decided to make a clean sweep and to limit my role from now on to friend and colleague. To reinforce my resolve, I invited her to lunch this summer just before we were both going on vacation. I chose a nice terrace in the woods, a table for two. I confessed that I was – ‘crazy, isn’t it?’ – shortly before she had started to feel something for her because of her outpourings, that I was afraid that I might slip in the direction of falling in love, that I started to feel exactly like before, but I couldn’t because I was happily married and she had just resumed her relationship and I was happy about that, because then we could just be colleagues and maybe friends again. I said I wanted to work with her to come up with a plan that might make her boyfriend want to get married.

But no sooner had I finished than something changed between us. She looked at me wide-eyed. Had I really felt the same as her? How was it possible. She confessed that she had been comparing me to her boyfriend incessantly for a while and I always came out better. Looks of recognition darted back and forth. The power of being understood is apparently very great in love. Now that everything had been said, soft smoldering feelings flew into the air like fireworks. I heard myself say she reminded me of a younger version of my wife and when she handed me her bike and jumped on the back herself, I felt like Rutger Hauer in Turkish fruit and thought: imagine if this young colleague could be my time machine. When we parted, we gave each other a quick hug.

This was three months ago. My wife said during the holidays: I dreamed that you were going to marry that one colleague. I told her the harmless version, the first stage, of the confidant I was. Soon my colleague will be back from vacation and we need to talk. So that’s how it goes, that’s how collegiality gradually turns into friendship, getting lost, into almost cheating. I’m considering looking for another job.’