can I bring a friend-with-benefits back to my hotel on a work trip? — Ask a Manager

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer wondering whether she could bring a friend-with-benefits back to her hotel on a work trip? Here’s the update.

My friend and I did connect during the first night of the conference. The rest of my team unpacked and went to an unofficial happy hour, and I told them I was grabbing dinner with a friend (with full support/approval from my manager). She and I ate, went back to the hotel (where all my coworkers except me were in adjacent rooms, by some miracle), and then she left around 10 pm. I got a full night’s sleep and was focused for the rest of the conference! I spent all the following evenings either wandering around the city alone or having dinner with coworkers.

I mentioned this in a comment on my initial letter, but I’ll say it again: My friend and I are lesbians, which may have been an important bit of context for people worried about discretion/plausible deniability. For better or for worse, I think that when most people see two relatively femme women getting dinner and heading to hang out privately, they’re more likely to assume platonic intentions than, for instance, if they saw a man and a woman doing the same. I am out at work, but heteronormativity is strong and I doubt that any of my colleagues would’ve batted an eye if we had run into them.

Thanks to Alison and all the commenters who gave me tips on workplace norms around evening obligations at conferences. This one didn’t have much going on after 5 pm, even unofficially, but knowing that there could be evening events helped me set my expectations better for the time I was there.