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underarockalongashore · 1 year ago

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I cannot tell you how I feel (but I can write it)

It is with a heavy heart and a guilty conscience that I begin this story. I fell for a colleague: a fiery, lively, spirited, witty man in my office on the 44th floor of the glassy John Hancock tower in the heart of Boston.

My team’s office overlooks the best parts of Boston: the Boston Commons, downtown, seaport, the harbor, the Charles, and Cambridge. With my boss and teammates largely out of the office fundraising and working from home, I make the space my own most days.

Diagonally across the hall sits Bain Capital Life Sciences. Unlike our spin-out healthcare growth equity firm, formerly a ventures team, Bain Capital Life Sciences functions like a traditional private equity shop. Analysts and associates work grueling hours and do the grunt work, vice presidents sit on top grinding but also supervising, and partners are largely out fundraising or dictating high-level workflow from their soap boxes. Alex (not his real name), my colleague on the life sciences team, is a Vice President. I suppose there was something inherent about being a Vice President on the PE team, coupled with his general aura that was inherently “attractive”, but not neccessarily anymore than others on the floor.

And then it was. It might have started when Matt (not real name) on our team, said with reverence, that he was smart and someone I should grab lunch with “if I had the opportunity”. Or it might have been when he waltzed into our office, looking for Matt for lunch, and upon not finding him there, swiftly asked if he could sit across from me and wait. He improvised a conversation, and peckered me with questions that made me wonder how I was being assessed. Or maybe it was when he popped in randomly later, asking me if I knew the meaning of Valspring, and I texted him the answer afterwards, and the ensuing hilarity of the conversation that made me smile incessantly at my dinner party that night.

Still further, it might have started when we went to our first Bain Capital party together. When he reached out to have me and a couple colleagues over for pre-drinks and I saw for the first time the little bit of nervousness he had while hosting. Or when we went to our second party, and we whimsically went from grabbing a 30 minute pre-drink together at the bar nearby to eating a full dinner together for hours, laughing at the most ridiculous things, like him randomly dropping his utensils on the floor, or me accidentally tossing my shrimp at our adjacent table while attempting to cut it. Of course there also were those frozen mango margaritas that drove us over the edge.

Perhaps after all of that it was a snowball effect. I remember starting to feel like the place next to him was mine. Funny enough, it started with being beer pong partners, and proceeded to feel like it was the only place that mattered. After that second party, I posted next to him, leaned on the kitchen counter behind us and nothing else that happened around us mattered - the coworkers asking us to head elsewhere, exchanging pleasantries - we only wanted to hang out with each other. And so instead of hanging out with our coworkers, we went to The Quin, the social club in Boston, just the two of us, and broke into the Algonquin room. The place he first told me he would date me, if I were single.

Those words - if I were single, ring in my ears and burn my mind like a scarlet letter. I am in a relationship with someone else, who I once thought was the one for me, just never with 100% certainty, the way he feels for me. While our value systems and my trust in his love were aligned and provided me the kind of comfort I absolutely needed in a relationship, I frequently felt like something was missing. There was never any insane attraction, I disliked us in groups, I never looked for him when we were in groups the way I know I’ve looked for men I am interested in. As the date for engagement narrowed in, I had found myself getting more and more anxious.

That night in the Algonquin room, I told Alex that I am in a relationship, and that he (Alex) and I were romantically incompatible. He acknowledged the relationship portion, but dove into the comment regarding romantic incompatibility. Since then we have had an ongoing debate about that, tirelessly discussing values, emotions, logic, and our past relationships. While I have distaste in his disregard for my relationship in hindsight, at the time I was so prideful in myself and my ability to protect my relationship and upkeep my morals, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with being friends. Given our pull, I thought that we had the potential to be best friends for the rest of our lives. But I underestimated our pull. Hundreds on hundreds of text messages and frequent hangouts involving sports, books, literature, investor events, social gatherings, 1-1s (which later became every available moment) later, we drank one night with friends and slept on the same sofa, and then the same bed. We held each other, and he touched some of skin under my dress and kissed me all over, just not on the lips. The only article of clothing that was removed was his shirt. I told him over and over again that there were certain lines we can’t and shouldn’t cross, and he would pause again and again. By the end of the night, I felt a strong sense of disgust. I’m not sure what it was exactly - there was guilt for sure, an overwhelming amount of it directed at myself - but there was also disgust at him. Something about his gaze, his sunken cheeks, the evil I saw when the soft sunlight shined vertically across his face as daylight came.

I was scared of who I was next to, and what I had done.

Yes there was a feeling of being head over heels in a barely containable, all consuming way. Perhaps I had fallen in love, but there is now a deep seated distrust that I can’t seem to shake, both in myself and in him. I told my boyfriend about this immediately after and over and over again. After attempting to salvage a relationship or friendship with Alex unsuccessfully - on both our ends - I completely cut off all contact with him at the request of my boyfriend. Miraculously my boyfriend has chosen to stay with me, and I do want to see our relationship to its end, even if it’s not a happy one.

When I see Alex these days, I do see chemistry, have love, an intense amount of care, and I think about him all the time, but what we did wrong torments me, and points me to question if our love was lust, and if a relationship that compromises our morals, has any merit at all.

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