TwoWeeklyMeetings

No contact wasn’t possible because we work together

I’m 46 and I ended an 18-month situationship with a woman I work with earlier this year. We are not in the same team, but our jobs overlap. There are two meetings a week where we both need to be present and probably half a dozen emails a month that genuinely require an answer from the other person. Changing jobs was not realistic for either of us. That became my excuse for why no contact was impossible. At first we said we would keep things professional. Within three days she sent me a message after a meeting saying I looked tired. I replied that I hadn’t slept. She asked if I wanted to talk. By lunchtime we were discussing the relationship again and by Friday we were back at her flat. Nothing had changed. She still did not want a committed relationship and I still did. We had simply found a route back in that looked responsible because it began with work. We repeated this twice. Every time, the first message was technically innocent. A question about a client. A joke about somebody talking for too long in a meeting. Then one of us would ask how the other was really doing and the whole thing would reopen. In April I wrote down what contact was genuinely necessary. Work email about shared projects: necessary. Speaking in meetings: necessary. Messaging privately after a difficult call: not necessary. Lunch alone because it would be awkward to say no: not necessary. Checking whether she had gone into the office that day: definitely not necessary. I told her I was going to keep our communication to work channels and work content for three months. I did not ask her to agree that it was the right thing. I just explained what I would be doing. The first few weeks were horrible. I became absurdly alert to her voice on calls. If she sounded cheerful, I wondered who she had been with. If she sounded flat, I wanted to ask whether she missed me. I drafted messages in my notes app and deleted them. But the boundary eventually became boring, which was exactly what I needed. We could discuss a deadline without it becoming a discussion about us. I stopped hanging around after meetings in case she stayed. I moved our chat out of my favourites and turned off the little notification preview that showed her name. Nothing dramatic happened. She did not suddenly realise she loved me. I did not stop caring overnight. Work simply stopped being the loophole through which we kept restarting the relationship. It has been five months now. Last week we were both at a colleague’s leaving drinks. We spoke in a group for a while, then I went home without manufacturing a reason to message her afterwards. That felt bigger than it sounds. I used to think no contact only counted if somebody vanished completely. For me it meant removing emotional access while allowing the boring, necessary contact to remain boring and necessary. I still wish the relationship had been different. I just no longer use a calendar invitation as evidence that it might become so.