is a clinical psychologist and couples therapist. She also works as a consultant for various media (Africa n°1, Binge Audio, Le Parisien...).
Picture © CP
Where are we most likely to meet our better half? At work! In 2018, 14% of people in a relationship met each other in a professional setting, according to an Ifop survey. And yet they’re not often spoken about. How do personal relationships combine with work? Does love in the workplace make us more efficient – and symmetrically, does a shared profession reinforce relationships? Psychologist and therapist Héloïse Galili gives us a few clues…
Interview by Apolline Guillot.
Does work reinforce love relationships?
Héloïse Galili: When we’re becoming a couple, we create something of a common body, which brings together shared values and experiences in a unity of time and space. For the couple who works together, their shared activity can play this role of a “containing matrix”, a kind of invisible shield which both protects and contains the couple, its energy, its libido. It provides it with a set of things to create together, opportunities of alliances to forge. A movement of to-and-thro then begins: on the one hand, the couple creates shared values, and on the other, these values are tied in with a way of working, shared experiences (negative or positive), and even a shared space.
I feel that these couples experience a simultaneity of intellectual, bodily, and emotional investment. And sometimes the company becomes a kind of cocoon: some couples who talk about their work will say things like “when we worked at…” This means that they’re identifying with a brand, a shared culture, which they recognise as their matrix – in the sense of their origin. Couples work “at”, as if they had always shared a home…
‘The whole activity can be somewhat eroticised, especially in the beginning’
Does this fusion affect their work?
There can be a confusion between the common work enterprise, that of “our work”, and the shared project of the “us” against “them”. Sometimes, the whole activity can be somewhat eroticised, especially in the beginning: we want to go to work to see the other and to work. And this is fairly normal, since any workplace is a place where the “ideal me” is projected. This notion, which we find in Freud, refers to narcissistic, fantasised projection of our own selves, i.e. the person we would like to be… At work, we tend towards this fantasised idea of ourselves which is also at play in the relationship of seduction. We’re always “performing”: we perform and show ourselves off to others.
How much does the company profit from all of this?
One might expect people to stay longer in a company when their partner works there too. Emotional and libidinal investment in one’s work is often temporal. More generally, when the company becomes this all-containing third party in which the couple comes together, it benefits from this discontinued investment even outside working hours. In the evening, the couple will often talk about their work. They’ll be more understanding of each other’s work-related problems and more likely to suggest relevant solutions. They have more psychological availability for their work! And this availability is beneficial to the company, almost mathematically: now there are two people thinking about daily work problems. If grievances overlap, if both partners tend to notice the same chronic problems, they will be better able to formulate them and maybe resolve them too. As long as these problems aren’t so insurmountable that they trigger a mass departure!
‘When the couple’s private project adds to a professional one, or vice versa, they become a kind of throuple’
Does this fusion typically strengthen the couple?
When the couple’s private project adds to a professional one, or vice versa, they become a kind of “throuple” [a relationship between three people]! Generally speaking, couples that last have a shared project, or at least a shared horizon of values, a way of seeing things… In theory, couples which form at work – or at least in medium to large companies – have everything they need to build strong relational alliances.
Actually I’ve noticed that the ideal presentation of the solid, fusional couple, which shares everything, can sometimes conceal narcissistic weaknesses or emotional immaturity. What is it that makes it so hard for these people to be apart? Why do they always need to be together? These relationships are easily challenged by the contingent events of life, the intrusion of a third party… Then, the fusion can explode.
‘Parents often think that the fusion makes the child stronger, when actually they’re often excluded from it’
A “third party”... as in?
I’m thinking of the arrival of children: in these working “throuples”, this can be problematic. Work already took up this third-party place, and the child knows this. Some children whose parents are both committed to a demanding job, such as a skilled craft or owning a restaurant, have expressed feelings of being neglected, especially when the project of having children wasn’t thought out independently from the professional project. Parents often think that the fusion makes the child stronger, when actually they’re often excluded from it.
What about remote work: is it changing the way couples work?
When working from home, couples who usually don’t work together are suddenly confronted with each other’s social and professional identity. We can feel the other’s stress, hear them speaking with their colleagues, their superiors, their interns… Either we find it charming, or not at all. In any case, remote work has allowed some couples to avoid having to be present at work for the sake of it, and in doing so, they can reinject moments spent together – over lunch, for example – into their overly long working hours. Of course, this fusion of temporalities carries a twofold risk: we can feel suffocated, lacking personal space… But I would say that in general, from time to time, it can be a way of stealing a few moments from our professional routine!
Picture © Joshua Coleman / Unsplash
