It’s Valentine’s Day – here’s what to do when your romantic and professional lives collide

If you date anyone in your industry, make sure you’re prepared to marry them. The stakes are just naturally so much higher when you decide to work with your partner – or date your colleague.

In one fell swoop, you can tear up your relationship and professional status, divide a workplace into rival factions, and have the source of your heartbreak chase you on missed deadlines around the water cooler.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

On this most amorous of holidays, we wanted to share our own advice to those debating whether to ask their colleague out for coffee this afternoon or pass a loved one’s CV on to the head of recruiting.

Having been married for years, and colleagues for nearly as many, we know that workplace relationships can be worth the risk – in spite of the predictable warnings and tired stereotypes. While we shouldn’t let the romance of today get the better of us, it’s important to remember that every relationship is different and cliches are largely unhelpful.

Here’s what we have learned from our own experience, which might be of more use to couples who want to work together.

First, there are the obvious perks, from being able to confide in your partner at times of professional stress to the profound satisfaction of building a business with someone you love.

But the more subtle benefits are just as important.

For those like us who are raising a family, working with your partner can offer surprising pockets of quality personal time. The shared commute into work (after the school run) can become a zone of tranquility for talking about everything or nothing important. Similarly, once meetings are over, work trips turn into romantic getaways in exciting new cities.

Because your work-life balance doesn’t exist in the conventional sense, you’re attuned to each other’s mental states; knowing when to give your partner space because of a looming deadline, or seamlessly coordinating time off together.

Sure, working with your partner requires a fair amount of discipline and occasional formality. Date nights go in as calendar entries, and pet names are left at home (which often leads us both to feel like we’re in trouble).

But in general, working together leads to enhanced emotional intelligence. As a couple, we agree that Mark’s MBA from London Business School had a positive effect not only on the company, but on our relationship. It taught us the importance of candour, authenticity, and debate.

We value these traits immensely in our relationship and workplace. Receiving honest professional feedback from your partner is a unique experience. There’s no translucent lens of resentment or suspicion, because the person you love will (or at least should) have your best interests at heart.

You’re fundamentally on the same side, so you both know that the only purpose of constructive criticism is to help you improve. This unlocks a realm of professional transparency that is hard to access with people you don’t know as well.

At our own gaming company Evasyst, we encourage a culture of discussion, interrogation of viewpoints, and subsequent progress. A favoured maxim of ours is from the dancer and author Twyla Tharp, who said “creative disagreements between sympathetic collaborators spur new ideas”.

Our relationship only feeds these levels of empathy, which in turn lead to good ideas, from company structure tweaks to deciding what type of experience we want gamers to have when logging into our platform.

There’s a famous adage in our industry: those who game together, stay together. In our experience, we’ve found working together far less divisive.