Do you mean the exec who said that to the black staffer about her skin color? I think it was a woman. Anyway, I think she told the black staffer that she (supposedly) blended into her chair, despite wearing a blue top, in order to excuse herself, to excuse her own bizarre overlooking of someone sitting right across from her. Instead of owning up to it and apologizing.
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I know. Stupid and weird.
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If you’d lead a girl on, then she’d seen you getting lovey with another girl, would you not expect her to be upset with you? Because in my mind, that’s pretty not cool. My response to this situation would not to be an asshole who INSISTS on “helping” a “friend” that I’ve made feel awful, but instead either back off and let her handle it herself, or find someone else to send over to help her. Granted, I’d never play with someone’s feelings like that anyway.
However,
You’re making it about you. About how YOU feel. What about how she feels? She feels betrayed, lied to, unsure. You coming and touching her, trying to be “nice” to her is just confusing the situation for her more, making everything worse. If you have a mutual friend, sending a neutral to your position third party over? Sure. Fine. But back out yourself and realize it’s not just about you. Touching someone who has stated to you they do NOT want to be touched is unacceptable, i don’t care if you think they’re your “friend” or not.
I feel like someone might come back saying “Oh, but he didn’t know she was upset at HIM!”. If he’s really that oblivious to not realize he lead her on… well. He’s got some other problems to work out in that case. From his behaviour I kind of doubt it… you don’t tell a friend you “Love” them and hug and kiss them without explaining the context when you’ve had a possible romantic past with them.
This is why it’s important to be clear with each other whenever dating someone. Prior to marriage, I’ve rarely been in a monogamous relationship. The people I’ve dated knew that and if they felt the same way, which they usually did, I knew it and they knew I was fine with it. I’ve found labels such as love, friend, relationship, although useful at communicating some things, to be worse than useless for setting boundaries and commitments because they mean different things to different people. Talking clearly about specifically what you want from and are prepared to return the other person is much more effective. Some people get uncomfortable with that or find it unromantic. I get the impression, possibly mistaken, from the story that Lamont’s male coworker was one such person. I’ve never dated people like that; it’s mealy-mouthed and signals a lack of maturity to cover up one’s own insecurities at the expense of the other person’s heart.
On the other hand, some of the people I’ve dated, and many I’ve known, have been comfortable with talking about it as long as someone else broached the topic, which was always fine since I never minded doing so. The trouble I’ve sometimes witnessed between friends and other people I’ve known typically arises when neither partner wants to bring it up. Perhaps they perceive asking where they stand with someone as a sign of weakness. I see it as a sign of strength and my most successful intimate relationships have been with partners who were clear about their desires and expectations without needing to ask, not because I had any problem doing so, but because it meant they were comfortable with saying what they wanted and what reciprocal commitments they would or wouldn’t make.
However, I object to any characterization that non-monogamy should be expected by default. For a great many people, monogamy is neither desirable nor more normal than non-monogamy. Whatever one does, maturity and class are embodied in honesty, not in making a specific kind of commitment.
The reason I mention this is that while I emphatically agree with your comment about the critical importance of respecting others’ boundaries, I do not think one should generally assume romance or intimacy implies a commitment of any sort. Which is why I feel the story lacks adequate context to evaluate whether or not the male coworker actually merits the characterization of womanizer, a word that implies willing deceit, not merely misunderstanding. Perhaps he was indeed deceiving her and the other women he was concurrently dating. But all the story presented shows us is that he didn’t tell her he was dating other women. If they ever made a commitment to one another, it was left out. Given that neither of them were clear with each other, that particular failure was mutual.
Damn right.
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Given the general temperamental hostility the Kelly woman demonstrated toward Lamont, there’s also the possibility that she set up the racist comment intentionally.
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I totally understand what you’re saying. And while I do agree that not all relationships need to be monogamous, i can also see from this woman’s perspective, that this guy comes off as an asshole. I personally believe that his comment about “Oh i did that because we’re friends” instead of “Oh crap I didn’t mean to lead you on to think that this was an exclusive relationship” suggests he was trying to deceive (to me at least).
My guess, from my own experiences and her reaction, is that if she’d been told by him that he didn’t want an exclusive relationship that she wouldn’t have freaked out. A lot of it was likely the shock of seeing him with another woman when she had no idea that that was a thing. In today’s society, exclusive relationships are mostly the norm. If that’s not what you’re in to that’s fine, but you should be making sure that you’re on the same page. So i suppose we mostly agree, but i still personally feel that he was trying to deceive. If he’d had like 3 or 4 encounters for sex with women at the company he worked for… that’s… in my honest opinion a pretty good sign of a person looking out for their own personal interests and not the feelings of those around them. Considering that he also slept with Lamont without even telling her he was a bit of a thing with another woman at the time… yeah he’s pretty much lost all right to giving him the benefit of the doubt in my eyes.
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Sorry for my once again lengthy reply below.
I basically agree he probably was, but with the big caveat that my knowledge of the situation is through one person’s written account, and not knowing her or him, I don’t know what he’s really like and have only brief snippets of what she’s like, which is just the natural limitation of compressing a two-and-a-half year relationship into an essay length recount. As with all things, I like to be aware of my own ignorance. But based on what we do know from her account, I agree he definitely comes across as you say to me as well.
It’s more common, but there are a nontrivial number of people who practice casual sex. Neither is intrinsically better than the other (I’m now happily monogamous with my life partner and wouldn’t want it any other way). Still, IMHO, people should never make assumptions about someone’s sexual activity based on what’s most common, in either direction. The practical avoidance of potentially traumatizing or even dangerous misunderstandings is reason enough by itself. But another reason is that I believe part of respecting people’s human dignity is never assuming entitlement to them. I personally find jealousy to be perhaps the only completely useless emotion, but I recognize that others embrace it to a wide variety of extents and it serves them well. Again, different strokes. As with all things in which there exists a diversity of lifestyles, I see it as a mark of respect for others to communicate with them when it’s pertinent and not assume they are or live one way or another. None of which excuses recklessly hurting other people, and it does sound like that’s what he was doing.
I agree completely with that statement. In fact, after no means no, it may be the single most important truth of all intimacy.
Statistically yes, but people are individuals and someone who does so may simply be promiscuous. Part of my my objection to monogamy-normativity is that historically society has condemned as immoral sexual liberation. Women have been denigrated as sluts and men, to a lesser but still wrong extent, as womanizers. I think it’s a means to control people’s sexuality. So while there are womanizers (and I lean toward the likelihood of him being one), I can’t get behind the the idea that sleeping with 3 or 4 or any number of concurrent partners itself signals duplicity. That seems to be the one thing we disagree on.
My guess that he’s duplicitous comes from her description of the things he did say to her, and the fact that he didn’t tell her that he wasn’t sleeping only with her even after she showed him she wasn’t okay with it and he apparently continued to do so anyway without telling her. At that point, if the workplace gossip I read third-hand is accurate, he was clearly lying.
The other thing I will add is that while mature adults should be able to handle workplace romances, the operative word is mature. Whether he intentionally deceived her or not, he had a professional obligation to, as you say, make sure they were on the same page. However, I believe so did she. I don’t believe failing to communicate is automatically malicious, but I do think it demonstrates a lack of maturity, and that, according to the details of her account, neither asked the other where they stood. Again, it doesn’t make them bad people, just something I think anyone should work on and which most people come to understand somewhere in their 20’s. If it could be taught to more people earlier before they enter the workforce, it would save both a lot of avoidable broken hearts and a lot of strained work environments.
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I still feel like this whole thing is an episode of Real World: Squarespace.
find out what happens… when people stop being polite… and start getting real
I remember when that show was on, I even tried to watch a whole episode. I lasted five full minutes. Other than dancing shows, that was the first and last “reality” TV I ever subjected myself to. I was sure voyeuristically watching people narrate their own gossip was a passing fad. Oops.
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My first reaction was “oh come on, a stupid joke, sure, but racist?”, but when I read more it seems too persistent to be just a dumb joke. It seems more like forcefully making fun of her because she’s a black woman. Fuck racism.
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Yeah, it’s not the multiple partners in general that makes me think he’s a lying asshole, it’s not being up front about it. I know a few people who live their lives this way, and that’s totally fine. Most of them, however, are pretty frank about it, it’s definitely not a secret.
Having read through her entire article, I can see why she ended up upset I guess is mostly what I’m getting at. And I don’t really blame her. I find it really hard to believe that after knowing someone for like 2 years that the situation would not have come up about him seeing other girls unless he was actively trying to hide it. Relationships are pretty core to our beings, and if they were close at times like she claims… you’d think it would get mentioned at least a little.
EDIT: Also, if one weren’t trying to hide the fact, and y’no, honestly didn’t care, wouldn’t his response to her being upset when she asked about the “I love you” statement have been more… explanatory? Instead of just basically denying that he meant it the way that was obviously intended?
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Your comment is a perfect example of how racism gets looked over 
It’s often a lot more subtle than one would initially think.
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Yeah, when I first read it I thought, maybe he hid it intentionally. Thinking about it more though, I’ve decided he probably did.
I think a lot of people bandy about I love you so often it rings hollow when they say it. Frankly, I doubt he knew what love really is.
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A support group for survivors of unfaithfulness in long term relationships that I read calls this “love bombing”. It’s a tactic of some cheaters to suddenly overdo the lovey dovey platitudes and actions. This usually blinds the other party to other red flags, because after all, “they’re being so nice to me!”
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I find I love you’s a bit mawkish. Love is an emotion (a wonderful one to be sure), not a state of being. No one feels any one emotion constantly. As an act, love is performing deeds of kindness for someone. You don’t normally narrate the other things you do for or with them to them while you’re doing them. You wouldn’t say I’m cooking you dinner…I’m driving you to your surgery…I’m going with you to Paris…while you did those things. You just do them. So if the subject comes up I’ll definitely tell someone if I feel love for them, and there are many for whom I do, but I’ll also explain what I mean by it which I think sort of undermines it’s normal function as a romantic overture. I also find the use of love as a separate state from friendship to be deeply troubling, since any lasting partnership is a form of friendship, not some arbitrary religiously inspired social contract.
I’m the world’s most unsentimental hopeless romantic 
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Love is a four-letter word.
Feels all nice and stuff but it is liable to blow up at any minute, break your heart to pieces and collapse on you in a heap of sharp, lacerating shards of your dreams.
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Remember that just because we’re all here because of the racist-wtfness excerpt from the story, that wasn’t the story she was writing - she was writing the “horrible experiences at that company” story, of which that was just one of the exceptionally bad episodes of a long train of bad drama. If Squarespace had actually had an HR department and management capable of doing the personnel-management parts of their jobs, that should have been dealt with, but so should a lot of other problems she had along the way. Some employees could have done that much adulting at age 24; I’m sure glad I didn’t have to.
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When one has to second guess themselves constantly, it’s a very bad environment. Chances are “Kelly” was totally intimidated from the onset of meeting this young professional. Her behavior is unprofessional; pig-like in the worst kind of way. I could go lower, but “pig-like” puts the message across.
“Passive aggressive” emotional harassment is used to break the confidence of a well equipped professional. The experienced “well equipped” will get the hell out of dodge or find a labor lawyer before too much damage is done. There would be a payoff and she could either keep her job, get promoted or move on to the next gig.
Neither mentors or real professionals exist in this company. When you’re a young, gifted and black and you see there are no alliances, equals; men can put their hands on you, it’s going to fall apart. If he’s doing it to you, he’ll do it to others.
Never admit to liking any co-worker romantically. This was a major mistake. Never touch or sleep with anyone you work with; it will eventually bite; someone will be embarrassed. A black woman will be the first traumatized, laughed at, and fired. Everyone in the office will know. Kelly may have lost respect because chances are she knew everything.
The master-slave mentality still exists. There are little tests to determine when people are racist, but it’s like fine wine, sushi, acquired with practice; professionalism and probably age.
As for the racist “it’s a drama” comment; had she flipped the switch and spoke to Kelly (the psychopath) in a flip like she blends into the wall, she would have been dismissed, reprimanded, embarrassed.
I love the fact that people of all races are signing off of Squarespace. I know I would never use their service nor anyone who is hosted by their site, and I do not care who you are.
Since there are no longer Department of Labor protections in place; especially for these “drug addicted” hipster start-ups; quitting; cutting the revenue share is the best medicine.
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The no-touch-at-work advice may not be the best. The “all touch is bad by default” culture, allowing haptic communication only in exclusive and elusive cases, has significant collateral damage. Lots of people then are touch-starved and as a result they behave weird.
Fairly common situation, when in attempt to make something better it is made generally worse.
And even a little can do a lot of good here. Case study, a new hire we got, a lovely guy fresh from Japan. Used to stay behind me and watch me working on his machine (and translating the error message from the spilled tea leaves aka Japanese) while touching my shoulder. Made me feel him as much more “real”, and the rest of the world as well for next couple hours. But in couple weeks the local culture took its toll and he stopped doing that. Same later with a new hire from Spain.
The no-touch culture of northern Europe and USA is literally toxic.
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