“Since the beginning Feeld’s mission was to make our society more accepting and open,” Feeld’s founder and “chief inspiration officer” Dimo Trifonov told me in an email. “You can say that Feeld is for forward-thinking humans who don’t put themselves in predefined frameworks.” Society has “tried so hard to make work this cold place where [we] just earn money,” he goes on, “that the concept of bringing feelings there might scare some people. Having feelings for a person is so human, why do people have to keep ignoring them or hiding them just because society says so?”

I think he may be overestimating the taboo on workplace romances. But to the extent that it does exist, this taboo has only been around for as long as there have been protections against office sexual harassment.

A brief history of office romances, courtesy of Moira Weigel, a historian of dating and the author of Labor of Love: “In the 20s, when you have this first influx of women into service positions, there were all these women saying ‘I want to be a stenographer so I can marry my boss.’ And that’s accepted.” Even though many women would also leave those jobs due to unwanted advances from their bosses. An acceptance of workplace romances persisted through the 1960s. In 1964, Helen Gurley Brown, who would go on to be editor of Cosmopolitan, published her book Sex and the Office—a “sisterly guide to the benefits of calculated office flirtation,” as The Boston Globe put it. In the ’60s, Weigel says, “there’s all this sexualized glamor around the career girl.”

Activist campaigns against sexual harassment took off in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1986 that the Supreme Court ruled that sexual harassment was a violation of the Civil Rights Act. And, Weigel says, it was Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony accusing then-Supreme-Court-nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment that really catapulted the issue into public consciousness and inspired many companies to develop policies against it. But the sexualized glamor never totally went away. “There’s endless movies and novels and pop culture things about people meeting at work,” Weigel says, perhaps in part because the very nature of a workplace romance provides hurdles that are good for dramatic tension. The New York Times published several trend pieces about romances between co-workers during the ’80s and ’90s, sometimes suggesting that since there were more women in the workforce, and since people were working longer hours, “the workplace becomes one of the likeliest places to make a match,” as a 1988 article put it.

And that seems to have been true. According to a study published in 2012, straight people in the ’80s and ’90s were just as likely to meet their partner at work as they were to meet them at a bar, and those methods were second only to meeting through friends. (Same-sex couples were much less likely to meet at work than at a bar or through friends.) But then came the internet. “The rise of the internet has partly displaced not only family and school, but also neighborhood, friends, and the workplace as venues for meeting partners,” the study reads. Workplace couplings basically halved between 1990 and 2009, while internet couplings climbed to just over 20 percent for straight couples and to nearly 70 percent for gay couples. And that’s before Grindr (which launched in 2009) and Tinder (which launched in 2012) and all their followers squeezed dating into every crack and crevice and quiet moment of a single person’s life.