"After another tearful argument on a street corner a few blocks from my office, I once again cursed myself for encouraging Ryan (not his real name) to apply for that open position at my company.
"Ryan is my ex-boyfriend, and our breakup was neither clean nor simple. But four months ago, those details didn't seem important to me.
"Ryan had spent a year desperately searching for a job, and the idea of him stuck in the Midwest, living in his parents' place and working unskilled jobs physically hurt to think about. He was too smart and too creative to have amassed such crippling student debt for nothing. So I hooked him up. I helped get him a job at a media company in the heart of Manhattan — something he had never even considered a real possibility.
"It wasn't until he was all packed up and moving across the country that I realized I'd done something really, really dumb.
"There was (is) still a lot of baggage between us — stuff I just didn't care to sort through. I was done, we'd broken up, I'd gotten a new job, moved to a new city, and was working really hard on figuring out who I was.
"But that's the interesting thing: The thought that my life was about to get a hundred times messier was barely a blip on my radar, because I was helping Ryan get his 'big break.' This opportunity, and its potential to launch his career as a journalist, overshadowed whatever 'lovers' quarrel' we were mired in. Screw emotional well-being, right? Just think of the résumé!
"I don't want to sit and whine about how uncomfortable and awkward and upsetting it is to work with an ex (because it is).
"Now it's been a few months since Ryan started his job. We don't talk a lot because we realized that we've needed space to heal from our relationship, but now that space is only created by a silence, a wall and a hallway. Retrospectively, I know I probably shouldn't have mentioned the open position to Ryan, and he probably shouldn't have applied. First, because healing ourselves should have been a priority, second because working with exes is absolutely miserable, and third, because opportunities come more often than we give ourselves credit for.
"But sometimes the allure of a job trumps logic, and I wonder how many more personal sacrifices Ryan and I (and people in our positions) are going to make for the sake of an advanced career and dollar bills." —Louisa Alter, Business Insider social-media intern