One of the current trends is for people to have an ‘office spouse’. In previous generations, you may have said that someone was ‘shacking up’ or slutting around, or that they were the office whore. The term ‘office spouse’ sounds less offensive. The change in terms does little to mask the damage done to a marriage by these leaches.
The ‘office spouse’ refers to the person who hooks up with your spouse at work. They are an item. What makes it worse is that although many people at the worksite know about the cheating, but the relationship is kept at work. The mindset of “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” is put into play. With the worksite supporting the affair, if you call in, they will cover for the couple. In order to keep their jobs and ‘keep the peace’ everyone shuts up about the office spouse.
There are also other variations of the office spouse. There is the ‘traveling spouse’ or ‘work spouse’ (work wife/work husband) which is the person your spouse sleeps with on business trips. By using the excuse of they get lonely, the behavior is excused by those participating.
In some cases, those with work spouses see little wrong with it. They have grown so accustomed to being partnered up, they see little wrong with it. Since they are cheating with the same person, they do not feel like a slut about the situation. Somehow sleeping with one person is more tolerable to them than sleeping with many people in the work place. When it is your husband or wife that they are sleeping with, it does matter!
In such cases, piercing the wall of silence around the office spouse is a challenge. Once you get people to be honest, then you are faced with the challenge of changing their thinking. By staying in a monogamous relationship, they have deluded themselves into thinking that it is acceptable. They do not understand that cheating is cheating, whether in the boardroom, the bed room, the pool hall or the White House. Cheating is cheating.
Best Regards,
Jeffrey Murrah
