my boss told me to stop having sex with my boyfriend or quit my job

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I have a question about something that happened early in my career. Obviously there’s nothing I can do to change the past, but I’m curious about whether I had options I didn’t know about due to my inexperience.

Immediately out of college, I was hired to work for a religious nonprofit organization. I started by working in their after-school program and eventually moved in to a supervisor position. My manager, “Simon,” and I got along really well for a couple of years (we were close in age and I’d say I considered him a friend), but in my third year at the organization, his attitude toward me shifted drastically.

I will be the first to admit that my performance really fell off at that time. I had gotten involved in an abusive relationship and was struggling to focus. I wasn’t completing tasks on time and wasn’t keeping up my relationships with my coworkers or the kids I worked with. Simon called me out on my poor performance, but would always circle the conversation around to my boyfriend, “Luke.” He made it clear that he thought I should break up with Luke. Obviously he was right about that, but he was my manager and I didn’t feel comfortable with him having input into my relationship. It was as though he wanted to be my friend but was trying to leverage his role as manager to “help” me.

When my performance didn’t improve, he called me into his office and told me to have a seat. After a moment of silence he said, “I need to know if you and Luke are having sex.”

I was stunned. I am a private person by nature and that’s not something I discussed even with close friends. I didn’t answer him, and so he launched into a speech about the Bible’s teachings on premarital sex (for what it’s worth, I disagree with his theological arguments on the subject, but that’s neither here nor there) and how he had made some poor decisions in that area when he was younger but now that he was married, he realized the error of his ways.

I was so shocked and upset that I began to cry while he told me that if I was involved in a sexual relationship I could no longer work for the organization. He then told me, in a way that was clearly intended as comforting, “The only person who will need to know is [head of organization].” That sent me into an absolute panic attack as I imagined him telling the director of the organization that I was leaving because I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend.

He took my crying as an admission of guilt and left the room, despite my never having uttered a word the entire time. I quit a few days later because I felt so embarrassed and attacked. I knew I would never feel comfortable stepping foot there again.

In retrospect, I wonder if I should have done something. The denomination affiliated with the organization only has rules about celibacy for unmarried ordained clergy (and even those are not enforced). It’s a relatively progressive denomination so there isn’t an emphasis on purity culture or anything. I never signed any forms about my personal conduct outside of work. The only thing mentioned in my contract involving religion was that I must be a member of a church and that I would lead Bible study once a week.

Did Simon’s actions count as sexual harassment? Is a religious nonprofit allowed to fire people for sexual activity, even if it isn’t explicitly stated anywhere? Could I have reported him without having to disclose information on my private life?

WTF.

There are some religious institutions that hold employees to a purity code of sorts, grounded in their religious practice. Normally federal law prohibits employers with 15 or more employees from discriminating on the basis of religious belief or practice, but organizations whose “purpose and character are primarily religious” are exempt from that law. Even then, though, they would need to apply any kind of religious purity code without violating other anti-discrimination laws — so they couldn’t, for example, apply it only to women but not to men.

But based on what you said in your letter, it doesn’t sound like Simon’s edict was based on the organization’s conduct rules, as opposed to his own personal moral code. There’s no law against managers requiring employees to adhere to a personal code of conduct, as long as they apply it evenly and without discrimination. So they could decide they won’t employ anyone who has sex outside of marriage (or who wears blue on Tuesdays, or who likes Drake), but they couldn’t apply that only to women and not men. (It’s possible that a state with very strong out-of-work privacy protections, like California, might prohibit that … although I suspect you’d need a test case to know for sure.) In any case, was Simon applying this to everyone, or only to you? And was this an organization-wide policy or just Simon’s? It sounds very much like the latter.

As for what you could have done, yes, you absolutely could have reported him without having to disclose information about your private life. “Simon is requiring me to quit unless I will agree not to have sex outside of marriage” is reportable on its own; you wouldn’t need to add “and that’s a problem because I’m sexually active.” If indeed this was just Simon’s personal agenda, it’s likely that someone above in him in the organization (or in HR, if they had it) would have shut this down and told him to stop talking to employees about their sex lives.

But I hope knowing that doesn’t make you blame yourself for not handling it that way at the time. You were in an abusive relationship and under stress both at home and at work, and someone in a position of authority wildly overstepped a boundary with you. You’re not to blame for not navigating this differently; Simon is to blame for being an overstepping asshole.