Pursue

By: Evan Miller

Oftentimes when I hear of in-work relationships it's on TV shows or movies, and in these stories we, as the audience, see the "obvious" answer as to who the main character should be with. I always thought that these decisions should be easy, as the audience is given a broader perspective of the situation and we have an almost completely unbiased view of the objective relationships. Where we see no brainer decisions, the characters see a life altering decision, and I hadn't understood that until a few years ago when I worked a job where two of my coworkers had a story eerily similar to that of Jim and Pam from The Office. Long story short, the woman who worked in my restaurant was dating a guy who was neglectful and selfish, according to other coworkers, and when we had a new team member join, the woman and this new coworker had great chemistry.

From the outside, I saw how these two conversed and exchanged information, almost as if they had known each other for years. I could tell that they didn't know they were slowly falling for each other. He treated her different from all the other coworkers, and we could tell that she had been drifting from her current relationship as she began to distance herself from it. When he had eventually come to me and told me how hard it was to have feeling for her, for some reason I was immediately reminded of Jim and Pam and how their relationship had a similar beginning.

After our conversation he made the decision to pursue her, and now they've been together happily for over a year. I know there's a timeline missing from that chunk, but I could write about this for days. My main point is that in real life perspective, some might see his act of pursuing her as a breach of trust, or wrong, but we romanticize TV because that's the life we want. Is it almost hypocritical to wish for the same direction for fictional characters, but to not praise it in our reality as well? We all want a fairytale ending, and sometimes the way to get there is bumpy, but the main question should be whether or not it was meant to be. Sometimes it is.