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Part of being a professional woman means always—always—managing sexual expectations with male colleagues. You know it’s true. You probably just groaned, rolled your eyes, and said, “Yup!” Even if there isn’t much to manage and you’re working with a respectful male colleague who is happily married, it’s still always there. Sometimes it’s a whisper. Sometimes it’s screaming in your face (or grabbing your knee under the table over a “work drink”). But it is always a factor.
Men don’t deal with it. Dudes: when was the last time you were going to meet with a female colleague to discuss work and you thought, “I hope she knows this is just professional?” Ha! The very thought of it makes me lough out loud. Because women don’t cross that line. Or at least, we aren’t shady about it. We don’t ask a guy out to talk about work, all the while having no interest in discussing work with him, and just hoping to sleep with him. Our minds don’t work like that. We don’t need to disguise sexual intentions under a professional cloak. We can just say, “Hey, I’m into you. Wanna do this?” Though we must know if we do date a coworker, we must be tactful about it.
It’s so easy for us to get men to cross that line for us that it also happens when we don’t want it to happen. Many of our male professional contacts are just chomping at the bit of that line, doing their stretches, just waiting for someone to shoot that starting pistol so they can cross the line. And then, they often hear a starting pistol when there was not one—they just wanted to hear it, so they made it up. Yup, being a woman means managing all of this, so it can be helpful to know the signs a male colleague has other intentions before meeting up with him. Here are signs that work contact is just trying to sleep with you.
This meeting could’ve been an email
He calls for private meetings, and when you get there, it becomes very clear that this could have been discussed over email. This did not require you two to meet in person, let alone outside of work hours, let alone at this rather romantic/swanky cocktail bar. This hour-long drink could’ve been condensed down to a three-paragraph email.
