It was Thursday night, and Mia was staring at her phone, crafting what she believed was a casual text to her coworker Alex. The same Alex she’d been having lunch with three times a week “by coincidence.” The same Alex who’d lingered by her desk discussing everything but work. The same Alex who had a partner of five years waiting at home. Her thumb hovered over the send button as she wondered for the hundredth time if she was imagining the electricity between them. By Monday morning, she’d have her answer – and wish she’d never asked the question.
The Choreography of Plausible Deniability
I’ve seen this play out in my office more times than I can count. The lingering touches, the unnecessary texts, the deep conversations about childhood dreams – all followed by the devastating “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression, I was just being friendly.” It’s enough to make you question your own reality.
Here’s what’s actually happening: humans are masters of maintaining ambiguity when it serves them. We all do it. We dance in the gray area where we can enjoy the intoxicating attention without taking responsibility for generating it. The emotional rush of potential romance without the messy consequences.
That coworker isn’t necessarily lying when they deny flirting intentionally. Our brains have a remarkable capacity to compartmentalize – to engage in behavior while maintaining plausible deniability, even to ourselves. We create emotional frames that allow us to see our actions as innocent while satisfying deeper needs for validation, excitement, and connection.
What we’re witnessing is the gap between conscious intention and emotional autopilot – those invisible scripts that run beneath our awareness. Your coworker’s conscious mind might be fully committed to their relationship while their emotional system seeks out the dopamine hit of new connection.
The Gaslight Special: When Denial Meets Reality
The denial hurts more than a straightforward rejection because it undermines your trust in your own perceptions. You start thinking: Was it all in my head? Am I the office predator misreading basic kindness?
When someone says “I had no idea my actions could be interpreted that way,” they’re often engaging in what I call retroactive boundary-drawing. They were perfectly comfortable with blurry lines until those lines demanded acknowledgment.
Consider these signs you weren’t imagining things:
- They sought you out consistently beyond what the situation required
- Your conversations regularly strayed beyond professional topics to personal dreams, fears, and desires
- They created situations for private interaction
- They shared information about relationship problems or dissatisfaction
- Their behavior changed noticeably in front of their partner or mutual colleagues
- They remembered small details about your life that required genuine attention
- They initiated non-necessary communication outside work hours
If you’re checking off most of these boxes, your emotional byte detectors were likely functioning perfectly. The mixed signals weren’t in your imagination – they were literally mixed, coming from different layers of the other person’s emotional system.
The Way Forward (When You Can’t Go Back)
Your instinct to create distance was spot-on. Not because you misread signals, but because the emotional dynamics were already unhealthy. When someone won’t acknowledge the reality of an interaction, continuing in close proximity only prolongs the confusion.
The most powerful thing you can do is hold your own truth. Not with anger or accusations, but with quiet certainty. “I understand you didn’t intend to send mixed signals, but I experienced our interactions differently. I need some space to reset our professional boundaries.”
Don’t get caught in the trap of trying to prove your perception was correct. It’s not about collecting evidence for a conviction; it’s about honoring your emotional experience while accepting that theirs may genuinely differ.
Creating distance isn’t punishment – it’s protection. You’re not running from rejection; you’re creating space for clarity.
The hardest part? Accepting that someone can genuinely affect us while genuinely not meaning to. That disconnect doesn’t invalidate your experience. It just means human connections are messy, layered, and sometimes painfully incompatible.
The greatest heartbreaks aren’t always from love lost, but from possibilities that were never acknowledged at all.
— Lola Adams, noting that what we call “misreading signals” is often just reading the signals someone wasn’t ready to admit they were sending