Have you ever heard this before?
When I was younger, my mother often repeated the adage “never sh*t where you eat” This can mean: don’t date/ sleep with people you work with, don’t date/ sleep with people you have a class with, generally don’t date or sleep with people you have frequent interactions with or have to see every day. It can become awkward when the interaction isn’t positive, and it’s likely you’ll lose that person as a friend, or even multiple friends in the process. Many people may have experience with the title of this article, but can sh*tting where you eat really be so sh*tty? Let me share a few of my stories, and what I believe to be the root of this behavior.
I heard my mom when she told me this, and I thought I understood, after all, I wasn’t attractive, and the boys I interacted with never had crushes on me or liked me back. I rarely found boys noticing me until I noticed a spark with a boy in my high school stage crew. Long story short, it was at this point that this phrase took on much meaning for me. We went over the pros and cons of dating or starting a relationship, and soon we ended a musical season with a label. We were together the remainder of that year, dating seriously for 9 months, but when we broke up in the second half of my senior year, my senior musical became awkward. When it came to choosing who to spend time with, our shared friends preferred spending time with him. When we did group builds on set pieces, our friends preferred to work with him. When we had show dinners, our friends preferred to sit with him. I felt pretty isolated and told myself to never do this again… until university happened.
As I said, I was never found attractive throughout most of my adolescence, so it was still very foreign to me for a crush to like me back, or even make friends that were attracted to me. As college progressed I was shocked to find that I had quite a few encounters of “sh*tting” where I ate–mainly through sleeping with a neighbor in my residence hall, and through friend groups. Most recently, though unfortunate, I had a bit of a sh*tty moment with a guy in an organization I joined last year. Once I became an official member of this organization, he and I began flirting. When he came over to hookup, the encounter was a bit rocky and wasn’t the most enjoyable, but we planned to meet up another time and try again. He insisted we had strong sexual tension and great intimacy. This was a lie. Following the encounter, he continued to leave my messages on “delivered” for hours or days, sometimes leaving them “opened” and never responding. If this was in hopes to “ghost” me, that’s a pretty poor attempt considering we had to see each other at least once a week with club meetings. In fact, as a new semester in 2022 began, I noticed him at our club meetings. He would enter, without saying a word to me (speaking to anyone else but me), and almost jumping up to immediately leave after meetings were over. Needless to say, this guy was not worth sh*tting where I ate.
I offer these examples to say that life can sometimes get messy when you mix business with pleasure. Sadly, though, I never seem to learn this. It’s a lesson I’ll have to keep repeating until I get it right, but with that thought, how would this situation go “right?”
I think we all know someone that slept with a coworker or friend and it went sour (see examples above), but we also might know happy, loving couples that began from this same interaction. Have you ever asked a couple, “so how did you two meet?” and the answer was something like, “oh, we worked in the same office,” or “we had class together,” or “we were in the same friend group”? That’s a pretty common occurrence!
Personally, I’d say the root cause of sh*tting where one eats is usually because we want that happy ending. We hope to have a healthy relationship with that friend or coworker. We hope that dating or sleeping with them will end in a closer bond, or just an overall good time. Sadly, though, this is rarely the case for most people, and myself. Although I gained a long-term relationship in high school from dating a guy I shared a club with, it still ended up making my senior year awkward, and I ended high school feeling distant from friends.
As a psychology major, I can tell you that the “mere exposure effect” is a psychological concept. This effect explains that repeated exposure leads to increased familiarity, telling us that we develop an interest in people or things that we see more often. It’s natural to be around a person repeatedly and start to like them (i.e. having a class together), and if you share common interests, that attraction could be greater (i.e. friends with the same values).
In writing this article, I want to make space for those of you that feel this way. You may feel prone to sleep with people in your friend groups, clubs, classes, or workplaces, but–speaking with some experience–I sincerely advise you not to. The idea that sleeping with (or starting relationships with) people close to you can breed messiness, mainly stems from the idea that mess is a more frequent outcome than a happy relationship. When it comes to sh*tting where you eat, just be careful. You may end up finding a good meal, or you might find yourself stepping in sh*t.