FRIENDS & BENEFITS

I Lost My Office Crush to the Hot New Girl

At first, I envied her, even judged her. But in the end, she provided me with an invaluable lesson.

Welcome to Friends and Benefits. Follow Tootsie Haine, our sex and relationships columnist, into the lives and psyches of men and women, young and old, gorgeous and tragic, divine and insane. All names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the bachelors in question.

I once had an office job in the entertainment industry. It was a bit like college; the company was large, with dozens of youthful employees. In such an environment, some amount of libidinal activity was inevitable.

I engaged in a lazy flirtation with Bret, an ex-frat bro who was good-looking and surprisingly well-read.

We talked about books. Over time, I suspected we might get together, but it never felt urgent because the competition seemed mild. Well, until it wasn’t.

Enter Chantal, the hot, gregarious, and incredibly vibrant new girl.

Chantal had a glow. To my surprise, she wasn’t annoyed by the stream of nerdy male colleagues who approached her; she seemed to encourage their attention, often with a coquettish flourish that seemed to floor her interlocutors. She was tan, thin, and she had a huge rack. There was no denying the glory of it.

Years ago, in high school, a boy told me it was all about the “boobs to skinny ratio.” A crude thing to say, and yet it was perceptive; it still seemed to apply, and certainly functioned as a kind of access to the way men thought and how they governed themselves.

But I wasn’t worried. Chantal may have been hot, but she surely wasn’t literary.

Bret had recommended a book by one of his favorite writers. On a routine scour of my local used bookstore, I came across another novel by that same author. It was a first edition, and it was signed: To someone named Bret.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I bought the book, read it quickly, and gifted it to him in the office. He was in awe.

I thought about Bret all day at my desk. But as I was packing up to go home for the day, I suddenly heard him in conversation with a girl’s voice—talking about Haruki Murakami, no less. It was Chantal. To my shock, she was both hot and literary. And she was in my lane.

I walked toward the elevators, passing them on the way. Though I kept my gaze straight and my headphones on, I could hear laughter and sensed chemistry.

I couldn’t decide how to feel; I didn’t blame Bret for having the hots for more than one person at once, but I resented that I didn’t seem to be the one he wanted to take the elevator with. I was angry he didn’t want me, angry he didn’t pick me. I had given him a book, and why didn’t that mean to him what it would have meant to me?

Over the next few days, I got “dirt” on Chantal. Sort of, at least. Photographic evidence indicated that she’d looked very different in college. (Women at the office who didn’t like her surmised she was on Ozempic—a rumor I quickly latched onto.) Watching her take on his advances had a different tang to it now that I knew she hadn’t always looked so conventionally attractive.

It seemed she had crafted herself for that kind of attention—like how I wore miniskirts to work, but it seemed much more extreme in my mind.

To Chantal, these come-ons, and being in control of them, were the end of something—the reward (or at least a pleasant byproduct) of her efforts.

I projected an intense desire to be hot onto Chantal, and it made me like her, somehow.

Soon enough, Instagram confirmed my fears: Bret and Chantal had started dating. In one picture, he had his arms coiled around her taut golden tummy. It was game day, and they had dressed in team colors for a bar crawl. (How tacky, I thought.)

Then I got more dirt—this time, on the other party.

Bret had secretly been dating Jane, the girl he sat next to at the office. Their relationship had been ultra-hush, yet they’d been on vacation together with his family and, apparently, he’d told her he loved her.

Jane was a sweet, good-looking girl, but I got why Bret had changed plans. His priorities were unambiguous, I thought.

Still, I was residually pissed that I’d gotten Bret such a good present and it hadn’t been enough. What did it tell me? Perhaps I was trying too hard. Ozempic, too, seemed to be a form of trying very hard, but I couldn’t confirm that assumption for myself anyway.

My vindication, if you could call it that, arrived soon after.

Chantal left Bret behind for the weekend to go on a retreat upstate. In the wilderness, she failed to respond to his texts—and he called her in tears. He demanded a more constant stream of communication and, not wanting to be on a tight leash, she ended things.

My respect for her soared further still. I admired her ability to walk away—so swiftly, so simply—from a man, because for one thing I couldn’t imagine it.

Maybe she was on Ozempic, maybe not, but either way, she seemed to have done it for herself. I guess, therefore, that it’s wise not to judge someone for taking a GLP-1. It’s also probably wise to befriend the women in the office.

Postscript: I recently met Bret for a drink on a visit to the city he lives in. We had a wonderful time, mostly talking about literary fiction—and Chantal. I told Bret that I thought she was kind of amazing. He told me he ultimately thought she was a little too obsessed with herself.

He asked me if I was seeing anyone, and I told him I was. He said that if I weren’t, he would have tried to sleep with me. OK, Bret.

He’s cute, but I’m happy we never got together, for, at least in this case, the fantasy surely trumps reality. We can continue being abstractly into each other without consummating our desires, for what’s often hotter than having sex is the very wish to have it.

Got a question about dating, an opinion on intimacy, or a comment about Tootsie’s tales? Share your thoughts with our dating columnist at tootsie.haine@thedailybeast.com.

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