Featured on @StorylineReddit: November 18, 2025
On Monday morning, someone leaned over a desk with a grin and a nudge, asking how the concert had been.
The problem wasn’t the date. It was the assumption that there had been one.
In offices where people have known each other for years, social life and work life blur at the edges. Lunch becomes commentary. Drinks become soft surveillance. Personal updates circulate faster than the person at the center can manage them. Into that environment lands a sentence that is actually quite simple: I’m not interested.
What unfolds isn’t explosive. No shouting match. No dramatic breakup. Just a refusal, and then a shift in temperature. A mood that settles into the corners of a shared workspace. Sighs. Glances. The faint sense of being watched for a reaction.
This story isn’t really about dating. It’s about what happens after someone says no and other people decide that answer belongs to them too.
A relatively new employee joins a workplace where colleagues have longstanding friendships and porous boundaries between work and social life. She participates politely but keeps distance. When a male coworker asks her out, she declines first gently, later explicitly.
The refusal does not remain private. He had told several coworkers about his plan, apparently expecting a positive outcome. On the following Monday, teasing assumptions circulate. One colleague reproaches her. Soon after, his demeanor changes.
He grows visibly withdrawn and resentful. He avoids direct communication even when work requires it. He bypasses her professional expertise in small but consequential ways. The atmosphere tightens.
Management intervenes when tensions become visible. His conduct moderates into minimal, strictly professional interaction. Months later, the conflict reignites indirectly when a friend corners her in a bathroom to question her refusal, leading to HR involvement and disciplinary action. She eventually transfers departments. The immediate disruption subsides; the culture that enabled it remains largely intact.
Text Version
coworker won’t stop sulking after I turned down a date
EXTERNAL
coworker won’t stop sulking after I turned down a date
Originally posted to Ask A Manager
TRIGGER WARNING: harassment, hostile workplace
Original Post May 6, 2010
I moved to my current role in late November last year. Many of the other employees have known each other for years and socialize together out of work. In principle I prefer to keep my work and personal lives separate, but I will go to lunch from time to time and to the ‘yay we met our targets’ drinks.
The problem. One of my male colleagues has taken a fancy to me and asked me out. There is no policy against dating your colleagues where I work, just not your direct supervisor/ee. However, apart from the fact that I don’t care to star in the office gossip mill (there seems to be what I would consider a LOT of over-sharing going on), I have spent enough time around him in the last five months to know that I am not at all attracted to him.
The first time he asked, I had no interest in either him or the show, so declined and told him that I preferred to keep my social life well away from work. Unfortunately, this apparently was not enough, as he asked me out again two weeks ago, proferring tickets to a concert the following weekend. This time, I told him that I was sorry if my previous statement had been ambiguous in some way, but I was really not interested in dating him and not to ask me again.
To make matters BAD rather than just a trifle awkward, it appears i) that this was a crushing blow to his ego and ii) that he told his confidants at the office what he was planning to do, in the expectation that I would be delighted with his offer. I found out this when I was asked on the Monday in a ‘nudge and wink’ fashion how I’d enjoyed the concert on the weekend. Further, one of his confidants attempted to reproach me for turning him down, to which I told her that my personal life was really not her business. However, ever since then the Unwanted Admirer has been wandering the office like a huge dark cloud, sighing and glaring, and pointedly avoiding talking to me even when I am the best person to ask a question of.
Frankly, this just convinces me that I was right not to date him and that office relationships in general should be approached with extreme caution – if he’s still behaving like this two weeks after I turned down a date, what would he have done if I had dated him and broken it off? However, we still have to work together and our mutual boss, who has been out on leave, will be back next week and will want to know WHY he is behaving like this. I realise that the action to which I feel most inclined – whacking him about the head with a file and yelling ‘PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER’ – would not help and would probably get me fired. What alternatives do you suggest?
Update Dec 21, 2010 (7 months later)
IdiotBoy and his IdiotFriend were spoken to by our mutual manager. IdiotBoy seemed to cool down a bit and decided he would speak to me but not chat. He would not ask me what I had done at the weekend, but he would ask me if I was done with the reference materials for the Blenkinsop report, or whether I knew who was dealing with our account at the newspaper since our usual contact was on maternity, that kind of thing. Fine with me.
Sadly, his IdiotFriend could not accept this, and attempted to corner me in the ladies’ toilets, where she said to me that she ‘couldn’t understand why you won’t just date IdiotBoy’.
I, unfortunately, had been having a rather bad day and countered with, ‘YOU don’t understand? I will tell you what I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you think my personal life is your business, and I don’t understand why you think that nagging at me is going to get IdiotBoy into my pants. And by God, if I hear one more word about it, I am going to file a formal written complaint against the pair of you’.
Cue appearance of departmental manager from toilet cubicle in manner of pantomime Demon King, numerous meetings with HR, and termination of IdiotFriend. IdiotBoy was spared the axe as he apologised profusely to me, promised that he was not responsible for my being cornered and would have stopped Friend if he knew, so he received a final written warning about his conduct.
This was six months ago. I accepted a promotion in a new department, where my colleagues seem pleasant enough and unstalkerish.
I understand via the grapevine, though, that lessons remain to be learned by IdiotBoy’s other friends. One of them apparently asked a female staff member at the Christmas party what she would do if he put his hands “there and there.” She cheerfully told him that she would smack his face til his ears rang. He seems to have believed her.
Courtesy of u/everythingisplanned who found this comment from OOP in the comments
OP provided some more details in the comments on his sulking behaviour.
And here, as requested, is the OP, to correct a couple of misconceptions.
My original post stated that’he told his confidants at the office what he was planning to do, in the expectation that I would be delighted with his offer. I found out this when I was asked on the Monday in a ‘nudge and wink’ fashion how I’d enjoyed the concert on the weekend. Further, one of his confidants attempted to reproach me for turning him down..’. Note the use of the plural in ‘confidants’. Also, though I guess this isn’t explicit, the nudger/winker and the reproacher were not the same person.
As I thought was pretty clear in the first para of the update, I was fine with my unwanted admirer deciding he would talk to me about business matters only, in fact that was by far the best solution. What I was not fine with was him wandering round slamming things down, glaring at me, scowling, backing away when I was near as if I smelled bad or might bite, and most egregiously, passing a client document written in a foreign language not to me (the holder of 2 degrees in that language, and currently finishing a translation diploma) but to someone else to try and work out via Google. That alone could have got him a disciplinary warning.
Nobody ever seems to mention, in the advice articles about dating colleagues, that it is entirely possible that they will say ‘no thanks’, and you will have to take it like an adult.
Source
At first glance, this is ordinary office discomfort. Someone develops a crush. Someone else doesn’t reciprocate. Feelings are bruised. That could have been the whole story.
But the tone shifts the moment the invitation leaves the private channel. He had told people. More than one. The plan carried expectation, almost a pre-celebration. So when Monday arrives and coworkers lean in with that light, knowing grin how was the concert? the refusal has already been processed as public information.
Then the behavior changes.
He wanders the office like a storm front. Sighing. Slamming a folder down harder than necessary. Glancing at her, then looking through her. Backing away when she approaches a shared desk. Passing a client document written in her strongest language to someone else to decode through Google instead of handing it to her. No explanation offered.
For a stretch, it’s just this: altered movement, narrowed speech, small reroutes in workflow.
Only later does it become clear that these shifts matter. Work depends on cooperation. Access. Timing. When one person quietly withholds ease stops asking the most qualified colleague, stops engaging unless required the strain doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates.
There’s room here for embarrassment. It’s not pleasant to be turned down, especially after signaling confidence to friends. That sting is recognizable. What complicates the picture is how quickly others step in to police the outcome. A friend corners her in a bathroom and asks why she won’t just date him. The question is framed as confusion, but it lands like insistence.
HR eventually intervenes. Apologies are issued. Warnings formalized. She moves departments.
And yet the story doesn’t end cleanly. Months later, another friend at a party tests a boundary with a crude hypothetical about hands “there and there.” He is told exactly what would happen. He believes her.
Some atmospheres disperse when management steps in. Others linger, thinner but still present.
