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Around this time of year, I used to feel embarrassed about my lack of a proposal story. It’s my wedding anniversary this week, which tends to prompt questions like, “So how did you propose?”, a question to which the honest answer is, “Well, we decided to buy a computer.” At the time, this was a huge shared outlay relative to our means. Having made such a big financial commitment, we decided that we were in it for the long haul and should get married.
Five prime ministers, three jobs and a mortgage later, I think this was the right call, but it doesn’t stand up to engagement rings hidden in cakes, at the end of scavenger hunts or in glasses of champagne. Still, further questioning reveals that most of these stories aren’t really proposal stories either: many of the couples in question also had a serious back-and-forth about a shared purchase, career milestone or looming change in UK immigration policy. They decided to get married and one of them constructed an elaborate proposal after the fact.
This may seem less like romance and more like when a local politician turns up to cut a ribbon at a car park or a shopping centre a few weeks after it’s actually opened. But what I found most striking about these stories is that more common than new jobs, financial commitments or the menacing shadow of the Home Office in precipitating this decision were other people’s weddings.
I’m more and more convinced that there is a phenomenon you might call “wedding contagion”, whereby the process of seeing someone in your social circle tie the knot forces the other couples in the group into the emotional equivalent of a margin call. Some are able to put up the required collateral and get married. Others decide that what they are looking at is very much a dead shark and call it quits. A similar process leads to babies and city breaks in undiscovered jewels in the former eastern bloc.
There is some academic evidence for my hunch: a study of American women from 1995 to 2009 found that your likelihood of having a baby went up if your friends started having them. Research shows that divorce can also have contagion-like effects in friendship groups, so why shouldn’t marriage?
We know, too, that the act of being observed changes how people behave: trying to navigate whether your cool new innovation actually works or if people are just changing their behaviour because they are being watched (the so-called Hawthorne effect) is a recurring challenge in public policy. (A frequent challenge is measures designed to increase, say, handwashing or the number of people vaccinating their babies, where it is hard to disentangle the change brought about by the policy you are trialling from the fact you are watching them trial the policy.)
“Wedding contagion” is probably a combination of these two trends. The knowledge that your peers are getting married both makes you more likely to do it and, rightly or wrongly, it also gives you the feeling that you are being judged and observed if you don’t.
These factors change how we behave in the post-pandemic workplace too. They certainly provide a more useful lens for thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of hybrid work versus the more binary “everyone in” or “everyone at home” models. And they definitely beat the increasingly arid “study-off” in which everybody points to a productivity report based on the workplace rhythm they favour.
It would be a lot more useful to accept that, for good or ill, a workplace to which people come in intermittently or not at all is going to be very different from one in which people come in every day. If you want your office to operate with the same sort of culture it had in 2019, then you probably need your colleagues to spend a similar amount of time there as they did in 2019.
Talking about the new world of work in a way that recognises the importance of the various social cues we receive from one another in person is more productive than any number of competing studies about productivity. It might also come with benefits of its own, particularly when it comes to bad internal cultures. Next time someone needs to turn around a toxic workplace, a good first step might be to get everyone to work at home.
At a minimum, simply accepting that while our professional lives have changed post-pandemic, we remain social animals is probably a good way to think about the future of work and what colleagues mean to one another. In the same way, your willingness to spend big on a shared bit of office equipment is probably a better way of working out whether you want to spend your lives together than your ability to hide jewellery in a champagne flute.
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