"How do you maintain professionalism with someone after they’ve made the relationship emotionally coercive?" Photo / Margeaux Walter, The New York Times
New York Times advice columnist, Max Read, answers readers’ work-related questions.
Q: I work in a role that was specifically created to support a department head who’s not my direct manager. Over the past few months, our once close professional relationship has shifted in an uncomfortable way. He became upset that I spent time socially with other co-workers outside the office but not him, and told me he felt hurt and “rejected” that I maintain boundaries between my work and personal life. I repeatedly explained that those boundaries are important and that I do not want the relationship to become more intimate. Instead of accepting this, he began disclosing problems in his home life.
When I was considering a role working with another leader at the company, he told me that if I did that, he “couldn’t protect me”. I told him that his language and behaviour felt creepy, romantically charged, disrespectful and inappropriate. During a subsequent, intense late-night conversation, he said he hated “walking on eggshells” around me and even said he wanted to quit.
I don’t want to overreact or destroy my career. I also don’t want either of us to quit. In an ideal world, I would like to repair the working relationship. But I also feel constantly on edge, emotionally burdened and undignified.
I’m struggling with several questions: am I right to view this as sexual harassment or at least a serious boundary violation? How do you maintain professionalism with someone after they’ve made the relationship emotionally coercive? If it’s even possible, what would healthy repair look like in a situation like this? – ANONYMOUS
A: You should talk to a lawyer. What you’re experiencing is sexual harassment by any practical measure: the department head has created a hostile work environment and implied a quid pro quo threat. But I’m not qualified to say whether you could win a lawsuit on that basis. Many employment lawyers offer free initial consultations, and they can make an assessment once given all of the relevant facts.
What I am qualified to tell you is that this guy is a manipulative creep. While “manipulative creep” is not a legal category, and the pronouncement of an advice columnist doesn’t carry any judicial sanction, I hope that my verdict can at least help you get over your fear of overreacting. Your colleague has engaged in a campaign of emotional coercion and unwanted intimacy that has left you anxious and exhausted – and you’re trying to envision “healthy repair”! If anything, I’m worried you’re under-reacting.
The only way to maintain professionalism in the face of this controlling sad-sack routine, one that would make even the most toxic emo teenager blush, is with militant patrolling of boundaries. Ignore or refuse to entertain questions or conversations not directly relevant to your work, and limit your communications to work hours, no matter how much emotional blackmail is threatened. And please, I beg you, do not have any more “intense, late-night” conversations with this man.
Try to keep your conversations public or retrievable in text and email, especially if other people can be looped in or CC’ed. Documentation may persuade him to be more respectful of your boundaries; more important, it will be useful in your legal consultation and in any conversations with human resources representatives.
And there should be further conversations. Reading between the lines, I get the sense that some of your caution around understanding this situation as harassment is born out of a desire to avoid rocking the boat at the office. But you already gave this guy a shot at a diplomatic “healthy repair” and he threw a tantrum. The only choice he’s leaving you is boat-rocking.
This may be unappealing given the stress you’re already going through. But this guy is not going to come to his senses on his own. Your priorities should be your health, sanity and career, not workplace harmony. That the former might well come at the cost of the latter is a problem your harasser has created, not you.
I’m in recruitment hell
Q: I know it’s an employer’s market, but at what point is it acceptable to push back on genuinely bad treatment during recruitment?
I’ve been in a hiring process for a senior nonprofit role for more than three months, and the (external) recruiter has been unprofessional from the start. I completed five interviews and, for the final round, produced a full presentation deck that took four solid days to prepare – uncompensated. That’s no small ask of anyone’s time. Throughout, the recruiter went weeks without contact, failed to respond when I followed up, and at one point sent me an email clearly meant for a candidate in a different search. It’s now been four weeks since my final interview with no word. I’m fairly certain I’m being ghosted.
I am furious! The time and thought that I invested deserve, at minimum, a response. Writing a breezy “just checking in!” email feels wholly inadequate, but I also don’t want to burn a bridge in a small sector where everyone knows everyone. Is there ever a moment when a job-seeker has the standing to name bad behaviour directly? And if so, how? – ANONYMOUS
A: One feature of writing a work-advice column is that a huge number of questions I get asked are effectively a version of “Exactly how much crap am I obligated to eat, here?” Unfortunately, the answer is never actually “none” – wage labour all but guarantees a certain amount of indignity and insult. But even in an employer’s market, it’s also never “unlimited”.
Just because you may need to work with this recruiter in the future doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stand up for yourself. The likelihood of interacting again makes it more important that you establish that this behaviour is unacceptable – with clear, diplomatic language. You have a sense of self-worth to maintain, especially through the abasement of a job search.
The good news is that there’s a vast gulf of possibilities for a response between an obsequious “just checking in!” and a scorched-earth condemnation. At the very least, you should email and ask if a decision has been made, mentioning that it’s been a month since your last interview. But I would be slightly more direct, and tell the recruiter – in couched, professional language – that you’re not sure how to square the amount of effort you put into this application process with the lack of communication on their end. You don’t need to burn the bridge, but you don’t need to let them trample you on their way across it, either.
The stench, my God, the stench
Q: I work in a small medical office in a large building. We have a private bathroom in our suite for patients and staff, and there are public restrooms down the hall as well. There are only three of us working in the office, and my desk is closest to our restroom.
At least once a day, one of my colleagues will use the restroom for a No 2. The smell afterward is genuinely abhorrent. It’s often so bad that I hear patients curse as they’re going into the restroom. There are deodorisers in the bathroom, but if she’s using them, they do absolutely nothing to cover up the stench.
Please help. I aspire to not work from my colleague’s colon. How do I have this conversation tactfully without alienating her or becoming an HR violation? – ANONYMOUS
A: The trick here is to wage a universal movement toward bathroom improvement, rather than a targeted campaign against your colleague. By which I mean: don’t have a conversation with her, tactfully or not. Have a conversation with all your colleagues, and propose that the whole office commit to using the bathroom down the hall for No 2. Blame it on your sensitive nose, or fib and say that some patients have complained, but don’t single anyone out, and make it clear that you too will be bound by this new rule.
At the same time, buy new, battle-tested deodorisers for the bathroom to underline the efforts. “Before you go” sprays like Poo-pourri are widely recommended by long-suffering spouses everywhere, and “molecular” deodorisers like Zero Odor and ZORBX are used by hospitals and assisted-living facilities. Draw attention to yourself and your bathroom-improvement project, and you’ll ensure your colleague feels no unwanted attention herself.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Max Read
Photograph by: Margeaux Walter
© 2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES