Dudefile #27 - Hooking Up With The Dude At Work

hey dw -

love the blog, appreciate your insight, and am both excited and sad to have a question for you. so. here's my dude story:

i recently started a new job where i work with a lot of cute dudes. there was one dude that i thought was particularly cute, and as i got to know him better, we started flirting in the manner of twelve year olds. you know - teasing each other, playfully fighting with each other, all that fun stuff.

it all came to a head about a month ago when we went out drinking with another coworker. the third coworker ended up leaving, and we ended up drinking together for about an hour, having intense staring contests and flirting in our normal manner. we had to split up, eventually - i had to meet a friend for dinner, he had to meet up with a friend for a drink, but agreed to meet up later. i met him and his friend at the bar, and when his friend got up to get another drink, he challenged me to a staring contest and kissed me. we ended up making out off and on for the rest of the night. he invited me back to his place, but i declined.

we ended up hanging out several more times with coworkers and would sneak off to make out, trying to keep it a secret. lots of drinking was involved. one especially drunk night, after making out in the field of a park, we started talking about our situation. i was pretty drunk and don't remember exactly what he said but the gist of it was that he liked me and he liked hanging out with me but i wasn't going to be meeting mom and dad anytime soon. i was fine with that at the time, and we've continued to occasionally hook up. we sleep at each other's places, ride the train to work together in the morning, and act like we normally do at work.

the problem is, i'm starting to like him a lot. enough to want a relationship. he seems to really like me, but he said he didn't want a relationship. i don't want to get hurt, and i'm starting to think that i should probably stop hooking up with him. the question is, how do i go about doing that? we work in close quarters and i don't want things to get awkward and i want to be friends. should i man up and tell him how i feel, or should i just lay low and hope he doesn't want to hook up again?

help, me, oh dudewhisperer!

-might regret shitting where she eats



Hi there mrswse,

Okay, so first of all, and this is not meant in a judgement-ish sort of way, you might want to take a look at how much of this whole thing happened while drunk. Every other sentence up there has the word ‘drinking’ or ‘drunk’ in it. Things tend to simplify and clarify if you remove some of the Cosmos or sidecars or PBR’s or whatever. Just sayin’.

Now, more to your question. Here’s the thing about a dude who you’ve hooked up with and see every day, but who flat out tells you he doesn’t want a relationship- he’s not exactly gonna be crushed if you put an end to the flingin’.

Here’s what he sees. 1) You’re cute. 2) You’ve hooked up with no commitment. 3) For whatever reason that is pointless for us to speculate about, he has said he doesn’t want a relationship with you. Those three are pretty much it. If you just look at that list, you can see that you are probably way more invested in the ins and outs, as it were, of some idea of “you two” than he is. Really, he’s gone out of his way to make sure there isn’t a “you two”, right? Hey, he may well like you, and you may well be more than an easy score for some cushion pushin’, but he’s had more than enough exposure to you to ask or accept more of you than sweet sweet panty treats. Past a certain point, he’s simply not interested and has made that exceedingly clear. If a dude was crazy about a girl The Last Thing On Earth he would do is keep her at arms length, never ask her out on a date, and leave her wondering if the dude liked her at all.

So, given the above, how do you stop hooking up with this dude? Um, just stop. You don’t owe Mr. No Relationship any explanation because, frankly, you’re not so intertwined as you think. All you’ve done is a little pinchylickyspanky. If you are out and he forces the issue by flirting in a way that says he is expecting another overnighter, then maybe you specifically tell him “I don’t think so.” But even then, the simple cessation of casual sex doesn’t need any more explanation than you feel like giving. He hasn’t exactly laid out a ten point explanation of his preferences, after all. If he doesn’t want a relationship for no reason you are allowed to not want to hook up for no reason. Make sense?

Look, if you want to take the long shot that this dude will be your boyfriend, the DW is always in favor of speaking the truth. In this case, though, it seems like you’d be exposing your heart with very little chance of getting anything back. Just cut the dude off and move on. He’ll be fine and so will you.

Best of luck with the next dude,

the DW