Hannah eventually admitting she'd actually practiced that specific bank shot a handful of times in the weeks leading up to that Thursday night. apparently having decided somewhere in the back of her mind that she wanted better odds if the opportunity to actually make that move ever presented itself. Learning that detail a few weeks after our first date genuinely floored me. This realization that what had felt like a spontaneous alcohol-fueled impulse on her part had actually involved a surprising amount of quiet deliberate preparation. You practiced a bar trick specifically so you'd have better odds of kissing me, I said, which he finally admitted it. That is simultaneously the most calculated and the most romantic thing I've ever heard.
I contain multitudes, she said, which had apparently become something of her personal catchphrase by that point. One I found myself increasingly fond of every time she deployed it. Our second and third dates followed in quick succession over the next two weeks. Both of us eager to keep building on the momentum of that first dinner. A hiking trip out to one of the forest preserves outside the city.
A lazy Sunday spent mostly just cooking together in her apartment and watching bad reality TV. The kind of low stakes, comfortable time that let us keep discovering each other outside the context of a workplace we both still had to show up to every Monday. By the time we hit that 1 month mark, it already felt less like early dating and more like we'd settled into something genuinely established, built on 2 years of professional familiarity that gave us an unusually solid head start most new couples don't get. I want to tell you about a real complication that came up not long after that, though. Because like every honest story worth telling, this one had its share of genuine friction.
And I think it's important to include instead of skating past it towards some easy, effortless, happy ending. About a month into us dating, seriously dating by that point, our manager, a woman named Patricia, who oversaw both our departments at a higher level, called us both into her office separately, having caught wind of the office rumors and wanting to address it directly before it became a bigger workplace issue. I want to tell you that meeting genuinely rattled me. this sudden formal confrontation of something we've been managing pretty casually up to that point suddenly feeling a lot more consequential once it involved actual HR adjacent conversations with a superior. "I'm not trying to make this a bigger deal than it needs to be," Patricia told me in that careful, measured tone managers use when they're navigating something delicate. But I need to know if this relationship is serious and I need both of you to be upfront with HR about it given that even though you're in different departments, there's enough overlap in your work that we need to make sure there's no perception of favoritism or conflict of interest going forward.
I talked to Hannah about it that evening, both of us a little shaken by how quickly something that felt private and new had suddenly become a formal workplace matter. I don't want this to become some whole complicated HR thing, she admitted. I like what we have. I don't want it to start feeling like we're constantly being monitored or questioned about it. I don't either, I said.
But I think we have to handle it properly, actually disclose it formally instead of hoping it just stays under the radar. If we try to hide it and it comes out later that we didn't disclose, that's going to look a lot worse than just being upfront. Now, we ended up going through the formal disclosure process together. A somewhat awkward but ultimately straightforward conversation with HR, agreeing to some reasonable guidelines about not being placed on the same direct projects going forward. Nothing that actually changed much about our day-to-day work given that we hadn't been working directly together anyway.