How to Lose Your Heart - and Keep your Job.

In an around-the-clock, team-based, fast-paced business environment, work becomes play. Collegiality becomes intimacy. Intimacy becomes, well, intimacy. Before you know it you're not just office mates, you're soul mates.

Like Joe Sikoryak and Laura Arendal, who met three years ago at the now-defunct "UnixWorld" magazine. Sikoryak's boss played matchmaker, urging him to send Arendal an e-mail: "Want to get together this weekend?" Monday morning they walked around the small office, telling people they were officially involved. Now they're engaged.

"I saw how he acted in public, and he saw me, and by the time we got together we really trusted each other," Arendal recalls. "Working together made it possible for us to get together."

Office romances are dangerous and inevitable, risky and routine.

When you're working twelve hours a day, six days a week, there's not much time left to have a life. So keep this edition of Starter Kit next to the company manual, for those times when the sexual tension starts to crackle in your office. Use it to avoid the pitfalls, preempt the gossip, cope with the breakup. And remember, as Phaedra in New York put it on the Women's Wire: when it's all over, "it's a fantastic lesson in learning how to cope with someone who makes your teeth hurt."

There are few rules governing love and work, and plenty of hazards. Where can you go for guidance? Traditional etiquette advisers such as Miss Manners advocate a look-but-don't-touch policy. Very wise, not very realistic. We asked three workplace-relationships experts -- Andy Erdman, Martha Langelan, and Deborah Tannen -- to take us through the stages of hypothetical but typical office romances. Here are their suggestions for dealing with the facts of life at fast companies:

(Also, take the Fast Company "Rating Test" to see what your rating is when it comes to dating.)

Global Search

Gary and Jane work as sales reps for a netware-services provider, covering the Southwest. Traveling together four days a week, they slowly realize they're attracted to each other. After closing a deal they'd worked on for months, the exhilaration is almost physical. Jane has always believed you shouldn't go out with someone from the office, but she wonders: Can she make this work?

Erdman: Office love can be tricky. It'll be really awkward if it doesn't work out -- how are you going to feel when he starts coming to work late because he spent the night with the aerobics instructor he dumped you for? And given the typically uneven power structure at most workplaces, it's often the woman who has more to lose if and when things go bust. Caveats clearly stated, however, I still don't think office romance is a bad way to go. My general advice is to proceed with caution, but proceed.

Aligning Characters

Arlene takes on a senior marketing position at a D.C. investment firm where Frank is a partner. Frank is unmarried, Arlene newly divorced. They develop an easy, albeit professional rapport. Frank asks Arlene to dinner. Arlene, who's still trying to come to terms with her divorce, says she's busy. Can Frank ask again?

Tannen: One of the luxuries of seeing someone you work with is you don't have to go out on a date. The whole notion of asking someone out on a date is a little outdated anyway. You hang around together at the coffee machine, move on to lunch, and maybe graduate to having a dinner -- which is more loaded than a lunch.

Langelan: It's cool to wait for a few weeks and try one more time. The first time, make it kind of general: "There's a play at the Kennedy Center. Would you like to go?" If the answer is ambiguous, then the second time be more specific: "Would you like to go Saturday night?" If she says she's washing her hair that night, you should take no for your answer.

Even though she's being indirect?

Tannen: It's a big loss of face to go on record as being interested in someone and being directly rejected. It's typically American to think that the solution is for everybody to be very direct. People should do a better job of being indirect. If what we want doesn't meet with a positive response, we can take it back.

How can Arlene say no and still keep a good working relationship with Frank?

Langelan: Tell him you like him and you think he's a great guy, but you have a rule that you don't go out with people from work. And if you have gone out with someone from work, that relationship is probably more widely known than you'd suspect. So say that being with someone from your work group was difficult. Tell him that you don't want to do repeat the mistake.

At what point does asking her out cross over into sexual harassment?

Langelan: The third time. I hate to say that, because it's a somewhat arbitrary rule. The third time is when people start to feel pressured.