You might become someone’s wife while in a registry office with a belly full of whisky, or at an ornate church with enough tulle wrapped around you that you look like a meringue. But you’re just as likely to become a wife while standing next to a communal microwave, nose covered, trying to figure out who the hell in the office tried to cook a fish at lunch.
To be a ‘work wife’ is a term that is sort of polarising depending on who is saying it and who they’re saying it about. At its core, it’s describing a work best friend, but it’s more than that. Just as the term ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ can sometimes feel too juvenile, too casual a descriptor for a romantic partner, ‘work best friend’ sometimes can’t convey how much you depend on this other person from the hours of 9 to 5 (if you’re lucky).
This person keeps you sane. They know all of your office enemies and share your resentments about unfair workload and people who wear really strong perfume in the office. You have a secret chat that if it were to be made public, would have dire legal consequences for you both. ‘Work wife’ hints to some deeper level of bond and a special loyalty to each other that has been decreed from on high – even if that loyalty just means waiting for each other to get your morning coffee.
In their book Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, Mollie West Duffy and Liz Fosslien create a typology of work friends. There’s the frenemy (your competitor in the office), the inspiration (a career crush of sorts) and the confidant, who is the keeper of all your secrets and therefore fits into the work wife realm.
If roughly a third of your life is spent at work, this confidant knows a hell of a lot of your secrets – secrets that could probably get you fired. The funny thing is that despite these stakes you may have never ever seen your work wife on the weekend.
Being a work wife can mean building a secret world of support with a colleague. I’ve been a work wife to friends I still have today, women who have helped me navigate sexist workplaces that seemed to take almost Squid Games tactics in their determination to keep us underpaid.
But I’ve also been referred to as a work wife by people with whom I have not shared that sort of reciprocity of struggle – older male colleagues, who have said it when I’ve reminded them of a meeting they needed to be at or when a report was due. This version of work wifedom does not feel like solidarity.
It feels like a reproduction of old school domestic gendered labour, the kind that requires a frilly apron and the presentation of a 5pm martini. The notion that the highest compliment and marker of appreciation that someone can give you is to refer to you as a wife, feels like a relic of the past; an assumption that unfaltering trust can only be found in marriage, which we know isn’t really true. In 2023, Newsweek asked if it was actually okay to have a work wife or husband these days (the answer being a resounding “not really”).
The merging of the domestic and work spheres is not new, and the corporate refrain “we’re a family here” feels like one of the great cons of the 21st century. Encouraging you to think of your colleagues and bosses as relations asks you to treat them with the sort of self sacrifice and unconditional love that’s expected in families… except you can be fired from this family at any time and you should not kick up a stink if your twin brother is being paid more than you.
It’s a handy way for organisations to demand absolute, emotional investment from their employees, despite all odds. “You tend to see [work as family] bandied about in offices where boundaries are routinely violated and you’re expected to work long hours, accept lower pay, not complain about bad management, and generally prioritise loyalty to your employer over your own interests – even if your employer doesn’t reciprocate that loyalty in any meaningful way,” writes Alison Green in her column Ask a Boss.
So is being a work wife just a way to survive a corporate hellscape? Or can it be a boundary-blurring reproduction of the emotional labour of the domestic? It’s a mix of both, probably. When it’s good and, well, healthy, being a work wife is just a shorthand for ‘I won’t screw you over’. It’s someone who provides emotional support, who vocally has your back in an environment that doesn’t always operate in a just way. Often they make your work better, pushing you to new creative heights. The term may feel outdated, but the sentiment isn’t.
It’s hard to make friends in the modern workplace: contract work has increased, millennials are less likely to stay in a job for more than a few years and with working-from-home the new norm, you’re less likely to make those accidental bonds by the watercooler. A recent study by KPMG found that having a work friend boosts your general job satisfaction (and boosts business outcomes for corporations – which might be why you’ve been forced to go to so many work socials this year). The real magic happens when you turn a work friend into a weekend friend – or just a friend, you might say. You don’t need a marriage certificate for that kind of bond.
Sinéad Stubbins is a Melbourne/Naarm-based writer, editor and cultural critic. Her novel Stinkbug is out now.
