How to End an Office Affair

Editor's note: If you have a pressing business-etiquette question for Miss Conduct, please send her an email.

Miss Conduct loves to cry at weddings, and if most office romances ended with one, she might be better disposed toward them.

Unfortunately most office romances do not -- they end in operatic melodrama. It's therefore worth touching upon the polite way to exit an office relationship while keeping your grace, dignity and most importantly, your job.

It's even more germane when we recall that the same principles can be applied toward ending any kind of business relationship, whether the link is with a colleague, a client or a supplier.

The Band-Aid Technique

The Buddha said that "life is suffering," and Miss Conduct thinks he may have had a premonition of office romance when he came up with that formula.

Like relationships everywhere else (and of every kind, even those that are patently nonromantic), office romances usually end in misunderstanding. Or too much understanding. Whatever the path, the result is all too often the same: hard feelings.

One method to abbreviate the hard feelings is the Band-Aid technique, in which you get the pain over quickly with a formal declaration of termination, then live up to it with no further contact.

The trouble is, there's very little chance of learning much from the ex-partner going forward (aka no exit interview) and no way to gain anything else from the effort you invested. The good news is it forces everyone back to their own devices quickly.