Maya: a catastrophic extramarital encounter
The transformation it wrought, and how that echoed through decades
The third in a series of true stories of profound personal transformation through romantic relationship.
Maya joined James’s team as a new graduate.
He couldn’t help noticing she was conspicuously hot.
He was a medicinal chemistry team leader in a biotech company. I was a chemistry software team leader there. We were both a few years past our PhDs, and had recently been promoted to the first management rung. My team supported his, so we worked together; and we also went out for lunch together every couple weeks to discuss work challenges as peers.
We both faced problems and uncertainties as new managers. We were scientists, we knew nothing about management, and the company offered us no training or resources. Sink or swim.
I now know that one main problem we faced is common when first promoted into management. We knew how to relate well with peer members of a team at work. That is not very different from relating to personal friends. A boss’s relationship with their subordinates must be quite different, although it should also be friendly. For example, the boss has to point out a subordinates’ failings; work with them to change their attitudes, ways of relating, or patterns of technical mistakes; and, ultimately, discipline them if that doesn’t work.
This is not friendly in the usual sense. It is difficult and unpleasant, and we were deeply uncomfortable with it, and we both felt we weren’t doing it well.
We also faced increasing doubts about our scientific fields. When James was an individual chemist, he took for granted what he had learned as a graduate student, and read in scientific journal articles, and heard discussed at conferences. His boss told him to figure out how to make a particular molecule, and that’s what he did, and he was good at it, which is why he was promoted to management.
But as a team leader, it was partly his job to decide what molecules the team should make. And increasingly he realized that the field’s theories about how to do that were based on dubious, dogmatic assumptions. In fact, many of its foundational ideas were clearly false, and led to bad decisions, wasting huge amounts of time and money.
In parallel, I was figuring out that the fundamental methods in computational chemistry were based on highly inaccurate empirical data and on “approximations” that were outright wrong.
Maya joined James’s team as a new graduate. He couldn’t help noticing that she was conspicuously hot. But, of course, he did his best to treat her exactly the same way as all his other team members. In his mid-thirties, James was married, with two small children, and also took the moral responsibilities of management utterly seriously.
The first story in this series was “Elena.” Writing the second, “Liota,” has been unexpectedly difficult, so I’m publishing this “third” one now. Fortunately, the order doesn’t matter. You don’t need to have read either “Elena” or “Liota” to understand “Maya.”
However, a basic knowledge of adult developmental stage theory may help you understand what happens here.
As with the other stories in the series, this one is true-ish. I have fictionalized details to protect identities. I have also simplified complex interactions to bring out relevant themes.
A couple times a year, the whole team flew out to attend a national medicinal chemistry conference. Scientific conferences are primarily social events, and most of the “work” is done at the convention center hotel’s bar. So James’s team was hanging out with other chemists after dinner, enjoying shoptalk and arguing politics and favorite science fiction novels; and as the evening wore on, one by one everyone drifted off.
Except Maya. And James hadn’t really noticed, because he was engrossed in conversation with her. He had been so carefully not over-friendly with her before that he hadn’t discovered how smart and interesting she was when discussing non-work topics. It turned out they had a shared fascination with the philosophy of science, and the early history of chemistry, and the symbolism of religious artwork, and…
…and James had been carefully not looking at the talisman hanging on a silver chain in Maya’s remarkable cleavage. But for a moment he did, and when he looked up she smiled and lifted it out to show him.
“It’s a pentacle,” she said. It was a star in a circle.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means I’m a witch,” she said.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
And she started to explain—and at that particularly inopportune moment, the bartender came around and told them it was closing time.
They looked unhappily at each other in shared disappointment at the interruption. “Uh… we could continue in my room?” she said. James nodded. He’d had a few drinks and a vague sense that this was dodgy, but they were both having such fun, and as a manager it’s good to get to know your team members personally, and of course he wasn’t going to do anything inappropriate.
There was nowhere comfortable to sit in the room other than on the bed, and they continued there, exploring what witchcraft meant in Maya’s life, and the tensions between James’s spiritual experiences and his lukewarm Christian beliefs and his commitment to scientific materialism,
and gradually the discussion became increasingly horizontal
and James could feel the heat of her thigh against his leg.
And then it was three in the morning. And James had a sensation of slow-falling into a soft receiving cloud.
She leaned in, her lips closing toward his—
—and James jerked away. “Early session tomorrow!” he said. “I totally forgot, sorry, got to go!”
He literally ran out of the room. Or, that’s how he remembers it, and told me later.
The next few weeks were the most stressful in James’s life. Not the worst—that came later—but the most frightening.
On the one hand, how could he have done that? He had utterly violated the most basic standard of professional conduct as a manager; and had cheated on his wife. Well, not exactly cheated, but it was the moral equivalent, more or less. It wasn’t just uncomfortably close to casual sexual infidelity. Worse—he realized in retrospect—he had been falling in love. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about how wonderful she was, and what life would be like if—
What on earth was he doing? He had been absolutely sure of his own uprightness. The day before, he would have been able to say, with not a sliver of doubt, that he would never do such things. It was tempting to blame the alcohol, but he hadn’t had that much to drink. And it would be unthinkably churlish to blame Maya. He was the one with power in the situation; all responsibility lay with him.
On the other hand—the practical consequences might be catastrophic. Some of their colleagues must know he’d been drinking alone with her. Had anyone seen them leave together? Had she told anyone? Who knew? What did they know? Were they gossiping behind his back?
In the lab, he did his utmost not to show any special interest in her—but was he overcompensating? He suspected he was being exaggeratedly cold and distant; was that a tell? Did she feel used, abused, or rejected?
He woke from nightmares, soaked in sweat:
He gets called into the HR head’s office, where Maya denounces him; he is disgraced and publicly fired for sexual harassment in an all-hands meeting; sex with her dissolves into horror as she shape-shifts into a giant cannibal bat.
Agonizingly, he didn’t tell his wife. He knew how hurt she would be; and what good would it do? But of course she could tell something was terribly wrong. He felt enormous guilt about hiding his wrongdoing; but although confessing might make him feel better, it would make it worse for her.
He couldn’t do his own work properly, and he couldn’t manage his team effectively while constantly worrying about what they might know and do. Much less Maya.
He wondered whether he should confess to someone—his boss? HR? Did he have a moral obligation to do that? Would that help? Or make it worse? Might some of the blame fall on Maya? That would certainly be wrong!
His sort of Christianity didn’t have priests to confess to, and for the first time he wished it did.
Four weeks later, he went to the HR head’s office to say he was resigning. The HR head was concerned, wanted to know why. Did he have a better offer? What could the company do to keep him? He was a valuable employee; how had the company let him down? What could they do to change his mind?
James couldn’t explain. He had no complaints. He had no other offer. He wasn’t looking. He didn’t have something else he’d rather be doing. The HR head called in James’s boss. James liked and respected him, but wasn’t going to explain to him either.
He went home and did nothing. For weeks, and then months, obsessively replaying that night, spiraling down in confusion, self-recrimination, exhaustion, apathy, and paralysis. He knew his wife was confused, angry, and terrified, but he’d resolved not to tell her.
She tried to get him to see a therapist, but he refused. He didn’t have a mental health problem, he thought. He had a moral problem. He had a problem with his self, with his character. He had betrayed himself, and his wife and family, and Maya, and his boss, and his team, and his company. Redemption was impossible.
“Get a new job at some other company, if something awful happened there” James’s wife implored him. But maybe he’d do the same thing again. He couldn’t be trusted as a manager. And he couldn’t go back to being an individual chemist, either. He didn’t believe in it anymore. Medicinal chemistry was intellectually bankrupt, and the whole of pharmaceutical R&D was a nightmarish morass of bad science and morally wrong incentives. There was no way forward.
James told me this story years later. There was a way forward, eventually. I’ll tell the rest of his story later in this post.
I’d like to go meta to this part now; to consider it theoretically.
First, an observation. This is a story about an adult developmental stage transition catalyzed by a romantic relationship with an unavailable person. The title of this series overall is “Unavailable Dakini Catalyst.” Maya was unavailable to James—not because she was unwilling, but because he was. That made it worse, not better! There are many ways someone may be “unavailable,” some of them surprising.
Second, when you take a professional course in stage theory, you get case studies like this as homework. You have to figure out what stage the person is at from what they said and did. Further along in the course, you might get posed the problem of figuring out which transition a person is making.
So, this you could take this as an exercise, or puzzle:
What stage was James at before the conference?
What stage was he at where we’ve temporarily left him, in his misery?
If you find this confusing, it’s because there’s a curve ball. This isn’t a fair question—or it’s more like a final exam problem in a stage theory course, not something you’d get at the start.
One clue is the concept of “lag,” in which someone may be “in” one stage when operating in some domains, and “in” another when operating in others. This is particularly common for people working STEM fields. You can read about that in “Leveraging lag: engineers and salespeople.”
You can read James’s own answer—and my response to it—after the break. But maybe you’d like to try thinking it through now first? And maybe post a tentative answer as a comment here?
Dreams Reoccurring
James emailed me a few years ago. Due to a recent event, he’d been thinking about what had happened a quarter century earlier. He’d looked up some key people from his time then, including me, and found my web pages about stage theory. Reading them, and then more in The Evolving Self, had made new sense of his non-affair with Maya. He wanted to know if it would make the same sense to me.
And also… there was an event. Which had implications. So we set up a video call, and talked for several hours.
The second half of this post has a second true romance story from James’ life, plus our analysis of both of them in terms of stage theory.