I did not fall for him. I just sat near him every day.

Every Friday, Kay Reports uncovers global dating scams, emotional red flags, and digital deception — so you can date smarter, not harder.

I did not fall for him. I just sat near him every day.

The proximity principle is not romantic. It is a psychological trick your brain plays on you at work.

I want to talk about something this week that I do not think gets said clearly enough.

Most workplace romances do not begin with chemistry. They begin with a desk assignment.

The proximity principle is one of the most well-documented findings in social psychology. The more time we spend physically near someone, the more we tend to like them. It is called the mere exposure effect. Repeated contact creates familiarity. Familiarity creates comfort. And comfort, in an emotionally starved world, starts to feel a lot like connection.

A 2025 Ashley Madison and YouGov survey ranked India second globally for workplace romance, with 40% of Indian professionals admitting to having dated or currently dating a colleague. Only Mexico ranked higher. And the Mint Lounge piece this week makes a point that I think deserves more attention: much of what we call workplace romance in India is not driven by choice. It is driven by hours. Long commutes, demanding careers, app fatigue, and a social life that has quietly shrunk to the circumference of an office building.

We are not falling for our colleagues. We are falling for the people we cannot avoid.

The controversial take

I have covered workplace romance in previous Kay Reports editions. I wrote about the love contract and who it actually protects. I wrote about power imbalance and why you cannot ghost your coworker. And I wrote about the statistic nobody wanted to talk about: that 40% of workplace romances involve cheating on someone outside the office.

But I have not said this clearly enough yet.

Proximity is not attraction. It is exposure. And confusing the two is how people end up in relationships that feel inevitable but are actually just convenient.

Forbes surveyed 2,000 working Americans and found that 65% cited comfortability as the main driver of workplace romance. Not shared values. Not genuine compatibility. Comfort. The second most common reason was a lack of time outside work to meet other people.

Think about what that means. The majority of workplace romances are not beginning because two people chose each other. They are beginning because two people had no one else to choose from within the time they had available.

That is not love. That is logistics.

And I say this not to be cynical. I say it because the distinction matters enormously when things go wrong. A relationship that began because of proximity rather than genuine compatibility has a specific kind of fragility. It holds as long as the shared context holds. When the context changes, when someone gets promoted, moves team, or leaves the company, the relationship often does not survive the loss of the scaffolding it was built on.

The Forbes data confirms this too. The fear of a breakup increases by 17% when people date a colleague. 54% say it affects their work-life balance. 52% say their coworkers treat them differently. 26% say it affects their ability to even plan a holiday.

The relationship started because the workplace made it easy. And then the workplace made it very hard to leave.

The red flags

🚩 You know them through work before you know them as a person.

Work creates a specific, narrow version of someone. You see them under professional conditions, performing a professional identity. You see them handle a deadline and a difficult client. You do not see them in an argument with family, navigating financial stress, or making decisions when nobody is watching. Ask yourself honestly: do I know this person, or do I know their work self? Those are genuinely different people in many cases.

🚩 The relationship feels inevitable rather than chosen.

When I hear people describe a workplace romance, I often notice a specific phrase: "it just happened." That phrase is doing a lot of work. Real relationships involve two people actively choosing each other. When a relationship feels like it happened to you rather than something you decided, the proximity principle is usually doing the choosing, not you.

🚩 You would not have chosen this person if you had met them elsewhere.

This is the hardest question to answer honestly. If you had met this person at a party, through friends, on a dating app, with no shared professional context and no daily forced proximity, would you have been interested? If the honest answer is probably not, it is worth sitting with why the workplace changed your perception. The answer is almost always familiarity rather than fit.

The Kay Reports rule

Before you follow the feeling, ask whether you would have had it without the proximity. Convenience is not connection. Familiarity is not love. And the most important question in any workplace romance is not "do I have feelings for this person?" It is "would I have chosen this person freely, in a world where I could have chosen anyone?"

🤖 Tools worth knowing

🎙️ Fireflies.ai

I use this to record and transcribe important conversations, including debrief conversations with friends after a confusing situation. If you are trying to work out whether what you feel for a colleague is real connection or proximity comfort, talking it through and then reading the transcript can surface things that are hard to see in the moment.

📋 Typeform

Build a simple honest reflection form you answer privately. Three questions: What do I know about this person that has nothing to do with work? Would I be interested in them if we worked in different companies? Am I drawn to who they are or to what they represent in the context of my daily life? Answered honestly, those three questions usually tell you what you need to know.

⚙️ Make

If you are already in a workplace relationship and things have become complicated, Make can help you automate and separate your professional workflows so your work and personal life are less entangled. One practical step toward the clarity that proximity tends to remove.

Some links are affiliate links. Kay Reports may earn a small commission if you use them at no cost to you.

If this landed somewhere, forward it to someone who needed to read it. Sometimes the most useful thing someone can hear is not a red flag checklist. It is one honest question: did you choose this person, or did the office choose them for you?

Hit reply and tell me: have you ever been in a relationship that began because of proximity and only realised it later? I read every response.

Kay Reports — Date smarter, not harder. Every Friday. kayreports.com