How did you meet your wife or husband? Or partner, if you prefer that hideous and almost meaningless term? Chances are, if you are between the ages of 30 and 70, it will have been in the workplace. Not all of you, obviously. A friend of mine met his wife in the waiting room of the local STD clinic — having reasoned that she was probably up for it, so to speak, once the antibiotics had done their stuff. He wasn’t wrong and remains a happily married exception to the rule. In general, though, since about the mid-1970s, most of us have tended to find the people with whom we will mate in the workplace. But that is changing with some rapidity.
ITV has become the latest company to introduce stringent measures to regulate and indeed restrict intra-corporate shagging. Henceforth all employees must notify the new, horribly flawed, gods of our age, the HR department, if they are getting a bit jiggy with a colleague. The rules state: “If a personal relationship exists between you and another colleague, both parties must disclose this to the company at the earliest opportunity.”
This raises a number of important questions, such as: what constitutes a relationship? Is it just a quickie with Kayla-Marie from sales at lunchtime in the disabled loo? (I’m not speaking from personal experience here, incidentally. Chance would be a fine thing.) Or are the HR monkeys looking for something more, um, meaningful? And what do they do with the information once they’ve got it? Is a round-robin email sent out informing staff that there’s an embargo on Kayla-Marie because Bob’s seeing her (and thus an embargo on Bob too)? Or does HR have the power to stop the relationship? Do you get a written warning?
My own reaction, if so egregiously bullied, would be to tell HR to get stuffed: it is none of its business, and in any case the Human Rights Act at least theoretically protects an individual from being penalised for having sex with Kayla-Marie, as long as she wanted to too, obvs.
But the entire corporate world is going in this direction. A recent survey estimated that 75 per cent of companies had rules banning fraternisation between colleagues in the same chain of command. Quite a few more ban in-house sexual relations entirely. And so it looks very much as though the principle means by which we have reproduced our genes for half a century is on the way out. This is a monumental sociological change, and it will have effects that none of us, right now, can envisage.
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Before the 1970s we met our future partners at university, if we were well off, or in our local community, if we were less so. The huge movement of women into the workforce and the Equal Pay Act changed all that, and the office, or workshop, or factory, became the main venue for establishing personal relationships. Several unexpected effects emerged. For example, the gap between rich and poor widened because we saw a sharp rise in double-income families and, as a corollary, non-income families.
There was also evidence that assortative mating — our propensity to choose life partners who are very similar to ourselves — had caused, or contributed to, clusters of autistic children in, for example, the Silicon Fen in Cambridgeshire, much as it was already suspected of having done in Silicon Valley. In a less extreme sense, all of us who, like me, chose our partners from the workplace ensured we were narrowing the diversity of those with whom we would have children.
What happens now that the workplace romance is becoming taboo? The answer, of course, is dating apps. It is increasingly the case that millennials and Gen Zers are choosing their partners with a rapid swipe-right of their hand, given that they are prohibited from even fluttering their eyelashes at Kayla-Marie, let alone soliciting her attentions in the disabled loos. There have been a bunch of studies — in the Netherlands, Switzerland and America — that give an indication of where this might lead. Assortative mating is out. When people swipe right, they do so almost entirely irrespective of race, religion, class and even hobbies and interests. The only thing that seems to matter is age and, most crucial of all, physical attractiveness. This is hardly surprising, given that it is a means of selecting a partner with little to go on except the picture on the screen before you.
So what can we expect? More diverse relationships, for sure, but also perhaps fewer long-lasting relationships, devoid of depth, with the concomitant knock-on effect for the kids. The real answer is that, as yet, we simply don’t know. Call it accidental social engineering and blame human resources.
Starmer’s got a big Palestine problem
You can see Sir Keir’s dilemma, can’t you? At the 2019 election 71 per cent of Muslims said they voted Labour — the highest proportion of any British community apart, maybe, from students and lunatics. The latest opinion poll suggests that this figure has dropped to ... 5 per cent.
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Further, there are several seats where the Muslim vote is critical. Muslim voters make up more than 25 per cent of the vote in a dozen or so seats, most of them Labour-held, and about 50 per cent in Birmingham Hodge Hill and Bradford West.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if a Hindu prime minister were eased back into office on the backs of Muslim voters?
Won’t happen, of course, because I think Sir Keir is going to change his mind on Israel very rapidly in the next few days.
A free pass for the anti-life mob
Should the Metropolitan Police arrest people for screaming “Jihad!” and various antisemitic insults in the street? It is a question which I suspect would quite bewilder Adam Smith-Connor from Southampton.
Earlier this year the former army reservist was arrested for standing still with his eyes closed a few score yards from an abortion facility in Bournemouth. He was accused of praying, although I suppose it is possible he was simply trying to remember where he’d left his keys.
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We are rather more rigorous in protecting the rights of abortionists and their clients than we are in preserving the safety of British Jews.
Johnson gets GB News job
• The Barnardo’s charity shop in Gorseinon, Swansea, has politely requested that customers not donate their “used or unused” sex toys after a number of inappropriate gifts from the public.
Staff stressed that Barnardo’s was a children’s charity and that kids often accompanied their parents into the shop. “Mummy, Mummy ... please can I have that large inflatable sheep?”