The first Bridget Jones film was made less than 25 years ago. Yet it contains numerous scenes that I doubt you’d get away with today.
This is not, however, because those scenes are offensive. It’s just that Bridget has an affair with her boss at work. And these days, apparently, this is considered utterly unthinkable.
If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who works for BP. According to the oil giant’s new code of conduct, all 90,000 employees must from now on inform the board of any “intimate relationships” they have with their colleagues – or risk getting sacked. Senior managers must also report any flings that have occurred at work over the past three years. Meanwhile, the rules ban employees from coupling up with anyone they “directly or indirectly manage”.
The reason is that these “intimate relationships” could “constitute a conflict of interest”. True enough, I suppose. And BP is by no means the first employer to impose such a code. In 2019, McDonald’s sacked its chief executive after he “violated company policy” by having a (fully consensual) relationship with a colleague. The fast-food firm prohibits “any kind of intimate relationship between employees in a direct or indirect reporting relationship”. Plainly, then, this sort of stance is growing widespread.
Even so, am I alone in finding it unnervingly dystopian? Such rules give your boss an effective veto over your love life. He or she gets to decide whom you may or may not date – and if he or she doesn’t approve, you’re fired.
Obviously office romances can end badly, and cause awkwardness. But think of all the happy marriages there have been between people who first met while working together. The colleagues who got talking in the staff kitchen, or flirted at the water cooler. The bosses who married their secretaries. Were they committing some kind of crime?
And anyway, what precisely constitutes an “intimate relationship”? Say you go to the office Christmas party, have a few drinks and snog someone from accounts. Do you immediately have to report this to the board of directors? And if so, how much detail are they looking for? Will this end up being like one of those excruciating conversations you have as a 14-year-old the morning after the school disco, in which your classmates pester you to say whether you “got to second base”?
“Dear Members of the Board, I write to inform you that at 10.42 last night, after team drinks to celebrate the 1.3 per cent increase in quarterly profits, I got off with Sally from marketing. I can confirm that we did tongues, and afterwards held hands. At the time of writing, it is not clear whether she wishes to proceed further, but I hereby commit to providing you with full details of any developments, should they arise.”
The whole idea seems very strange. And, for that matter, sad. I feel sorry for young people today, because finding a girlfriend or boyfriend must be so much more complicated than it was in the past. Post #MeToo, they daren’t risk trying to chat up a stranger in a bar, in case it’s misconstrued as harassment. And now, they daren’t risk asking out someone from work, in case it costs them their job. For young people in the 2020s, it seems, the only legitimate method of seeking a mate is to use a dating app. How depressing. No wonder so many are struggling to form relationships.
We often fret about what our children are being taught in sex education. But perhaps it’s a waste of time teaching them about sex at all. The way the world is going, they’ll never get the chance to do it.
