The canteen was quieter than usual the day before I lost my job. People were whispering in person and quietly typing on Slack about mergers and restructures and rumors they’d apparently heard from someone in the elevator. Something just felt off. That evening, I insisted that my partner and I have beans on toast for dinner.
I’d found the recipe—if you can call it that—on the very website from which I was about to be laid off. “Rice and beans is a joke of cheap eating, but it’s also the gospel,” Jaime Green wrote. “And the way I learned to love the humble legume, in my own carefully budgeted cooking, was through bodega beans.”1 The concept behind “bodega beans,” originally written about in a 2007 post on the food blog The Amateur Gourmet,2 was that you could buy every ingredient for this cheap and allegedly delicious meal at your local bodega (corner shop). Following the vague recipe felt like all I could do to keep my mind off the storm I could feel rolling in. I sautéed a little garlic and some onion in a pan with olive oil, added a can of white beans, then seasoned everything with salt and pepper. Once they were warmed, I served my beans on two slices of buttered toast.
Before I’d even taken a bite, I saw the email notification flash on my phone screen: a round of major layoffs was coming, and my team would likely be affected. I looked down at the beans, hoping to feel grateful for the fact that I hadn’t received this news minutes after ordering expensive takeout or while sitting in a restaurant waiting to be served a twenty-eight-dollar pasta I could easily have made at home. Instead, I felt depressed. To top it all off, the beans tasted like shit.
That first time I was laid off I didn’t just lose my job, I also lost my visa. During the three months it took me to find a new job—and an accompanying permission slip to stay in the country—I spent every day applying for every role that I was remotely qualified for, along with a few I definitely wasn’t. I spent afternoons watching teen dramas on Netflix and miserably texting my group chat I had with my former team, who were also living out the same lather-rinse-repeat cycle of unemployment. Each day without a tether to the country I was living in was hard, but not seeing my work friends every day was excruciating. When I’d first arrived in the US, I’d taken for granted how lucky I was to have clicked with my coworkers so instantly—they weren’t just new friends in a new country, they were new friends with whom I was able to spend forty hours a week typing, laughing, and gossiping.
The media company we’d all worked for promoted friendship in the office; so much so that we were encouraged to think of our colleagues as family. The canteen was expansive, with large tables made for groups of rowdy twentysomethings; holiday parties went late into the night; and team outings and happy hours weren’t only tolerated but encouraged (and often expensed on corporate credit cards). When the company dissolved our team—cutting us off from the family it had forced us to create—it felt like they were trying to dissolve our friendships too.
We also happened to be in the middle of a demonic New York winter. On one of my worst days, I walked four blocks in 8°F weather to buy myself a houseplant as a reward for hitting a new milestone of job applications. Within hours of getting home, the plant’s leaves had turned black, its frozen cells defrosting and killing it from the inside out. That wilted peace lily sat on my coffee table for days, a reminder of the fragility of hope. Thankfully, weeks before my visa timed out, I found another job. I worked there, and loved it, until deciding to leave the US of my own accord in late 2020 for obvious global pandemic–related reasons. I was excited to be back in Australia, where my stability wouldn’t be so wholly tied to my employment, though I soon learned that there was a lot more I should have wished for.
My new job was as the editor in chief at a different media company. But after almost two years, I was laid off again. After I got the news, my partner and I went out for dinner. I ordered us rounds of margaritas and didn’t once consider whether we had tins of beans or a lone brown onion waiting for us at home. I wasn’t worried about my visa or money or security; I felt free. To lose a job that felt like just that—a job—rather than one that felt like a family was easier to stomach.
Two days later, on the afternoon of my final day of employment, I logged off early and went to the pub. Three former members of my team—all women in their late twenties and early thirties, all still employed by the company I was hours away from officially leaving—came to join me. Over three bottles of wine, I thought of what I’d learned about these women while working alongside them, and how different our conversations were from the wistful ones I’d shared with coworkers three years earlier.
These were friendships I was sure I could carry into the next chapter of my life, but before I’d even been locked out of my email account, I knew there would be no longing for the days when we’d all sat side by side. Rather than the joyous icing on top of a job I loved, as has been the case at previous workplaces, these friendships had functioned as a protective blanket that helped us all get through each arduous day of confusion and pivoting directions. Instead of being encouraged to consider our company a family, as I had felt in my previous role, we’d created a workplace family on our own terms.
That afternoon, we spoke a little about the company I was leaving, what it would look like without me, and of the work we’d all done together. But mostly we spoke of care. Who would need the most comfort in my absence? How would the remaining staff link together to build a safety net to protect themselves for what could possibly come next?
Walking home from the pub that night, I thought of everything I knew about the people on my team: breakups, unwell parents, and endometriosis diagnoses that meant necessary days in bed and hard-to-get appointments. After two years, I left my job with pockets full of emotional breadcrumbs that I’d collected, one by one, after countless meetings, Zoom calls, and “I won’t be in today, I’m so sorry” texts. In 2019, I’d packed up my desk wondering: What’s next for me? But this time, I left thinking only: What about them? In the workplace I’d just farewell’d, friendship wasn’t a social perk, a way to occupy long days and make lunch breaks fun—it was a means of survival.
Back in 2013, two years after I got my first job working in magazines, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead3 promised to help women thrive at work. But not by implementing any changes in the workplace itself. According to the former Facebook COO, it was women who had to start doing things differently if they ever wanted to get ahead. Sandberg’s approach to work, brimming with what would eventually be known as “girlboss” behavior, overlooked the broader systemic issues that exist in the workplace. It generally ignored the experiences of women of color, nonbinary people, and trans women, along with economic inequality and the kind of deeply entrenched sexism that can’t be solved by adopting a “power pose.”
For a long time, my own identity and self-worth were so closely bound with my career success that from a distance, all three might as well have been measuring the same thing. It makes sense that, through these years, I didn’t feel like anyone could understand me as well as my work friends. They knew what it meant to get “senior” added to my job title, even if that so-called promotion didn’t come with a pay raise. They got why I so firmly believed the work I was doing wasn’t just meaningful but necessary.
My work friends understood it all, because they felt the same way. I didn’t need to justify long hours or bad pay to them or explain why I stayed at a publishing company that was so clearly crumbling, because they were there with me on deadline nights, their bank accounts were equally empty, and they were hanging on just as tightly to the promise we’d all been sold about how lucky we were to have the jobs we did. My work has always meant a lot to me, and so have the friends I’ve worked with. But while my relationship to the workplace has since changed, the importance I place on work friends is as strong as ever.
In recent years, there’s been a culture-wide shift in how many people view work. I know I’m not alone in feeling less motivated by promotions and meaningless perks and more inspired by companies that offer flexible working arrangements and competitive leave policies. The so-called “great resignation”—a term coined by Anthony Klotz,4 a professor of management at University College London’s School of Management—saw record numbers of people in the US quit their jobs in 2021 and 2022. According to the Harvard Business Review,5 five key factors drove up these resignation statistics: retirement, which saw older workers leave the workforce at a younger age than they might have before the pandemic; relocation, as people left their role because they wanted to move elsewhere; reconsideration, in which people felt their approach to work change due to burnout or increased caretaking responsibilities; reshuffling, which accounted for people who quit their current role to find a new one; and reluctance, which saw people quit out of fear of contracting COVID or returning to a workplace that didn’t offer remote or hybrid options.
Despite these resignations happening for a wide-ranging number of reasons, the figures spurred countless TikToks, essays, and somewhat oblivious LinkedIn posts from executives and recruitment specialists that suggested a more pointed motivation. When Kim Kardashian infamously said, “It seems like nobody wants to work these days,” many people replied with a confused, “Well, why would we?”
According to the American Psychological Association’s “2023 Work in America Survey,” 77 percent of workers reported having experienced work-related stress in the past month, with 57 percent of those experiencing feelings associated with burnout, like emotional exhaustion, a desire to quit, a lack of motivation, and anger toward coworkers and customers. Only two-fifths of workers surveyed believed their employers offered a culture in which time off is respected. Factor in a lack of health insurance with mental health coverage, limited access to employee assistance programs, and workplaces that are becoming less flexible than they were in the past, and it’s no wonder many people consider putting in their resignation.
There are plenty of reasons for employees to feel disheartened about the current state of work. Salaries aren’t increasing at the same rate as inflation, workforces are being downsized as tasks are automated by machines or AI, and a lack of government support and funding is leaving many industries—from the arts to education—feeling as though they’re an inch from total collapse. But for a lot of other people, it’s as simple as this: people who feel lonely at work are more likely to want to leave their jobs. And a whole lot of people are feeling alone in the workplace right now.
In her book The Lonely Century: A Call to Reconnect,6 economist Noreena Hertz offers an explanation as to why every industry—not just those that have shifted to remote work—are experiencing record levels of loneliness. “Part of the reason many of us feel so detached from our colleagues today is because the quality of our communication with them is so much shallower than in the past,” she writes. As teams downsize and workloads increase, our focus at work is more likely to be on productivity than cultivating friendships. When you’re overworked, as people across most industries are, it’s hard to justify a coffee break or lengthy conversation with a colleague, client, or regular customer. As long as friendships aren’t a measure of success in the workplace, they’re never going to be a priority.
Technology’s influence on workplace loneliness feels obvious: a Slack DM isn’t as personable as visiting someone at their desk to ask them a question, and an email replacing a meeting, while preferable for people’s productivity and time management, isn’t going to involve the pre- and post-meeting chatter that helps make work interactions feel less transactional.
In her research, Hertz also found that modern workplace updates, like open-plan office layouts, had a negative effect on employee friendships. If you’ve ever worked in an open-plan office, especially those where hot desking (shared workspace) is either mandatory or encouraged, you’ll likely be familiar with their eerie quiet. Though it sounds counterintuitive, research has found that workplaces with cubicles offer people the privacy they need to speak out loud to one another and, in turn, become closer.7 Sitting next to a different person every day and worrying that every word you say can be heard by an entire office encourages people to keep quiet and keep to themselves. And the more we keep to ourselves, the more likely we are to take breaks alone, skip office happy hours, and avoid team lunches, which eventually end up feeling like a gathering of relative strangers.
As Hertz writes, “The loneliness of work is not only about feeling disconnected from the people we work with, whether our colleagues or our boss. It’s also about feeling bereft of agency, feeling powerless.” So many things are out of our control in the workplace, from our workload to our seating arrangements. The desire to belong is an inherently human experience and, if connection doesn’t look possible from where we’re currently standing, our instincts will push us to move somewhere else. When I speak to Dr. Michelle Lim, a clinical psychologist and loneliness researcher, about workplace friendships, she assures me that loneliness can be a necessary instigator for change. “Sometimes, loneliness is a prompt to do something different.”
The opposite of loneliness is connection, just as the opposite of burnout is motivation, and the opposite of failure is success. After my call with Dr. Lim, I wonder: If the deep ache of loneliness can inspire us to look to friendship as a solution, why wouldn’t that be just as possible with feelings of failure and workplace exhaustion? If leaning in isn’t the answer, perhaps leaning on each other is.
In Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,8 Anne Helen Petersen digs deeper into ideas she first wrote about in her viral 2019 BuzzFeed essay on burnout, which put words to the way an entire generation were coming to understand their relationship with the workplace.9 “We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system—of capitalism and mediocrity—or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken,” writes Petersen.
Much of Petersen’s writing about burnout and the modern workplace rings true to me—sometimes painfully so—as it does to most millennials I know. In her book, Petersen writes that our shared desire for the “cool job” was a means of elevating a certain kind of labor to the point that we felt honored to be doing it. Many of us have been made to feel “lucky” to have a job that’s deemed impressive, regardless of whether it’s well paid or possible to be done within reasonable working hours. The desirability of these kinds of jobs, Petersen writes, is what makes them so unsustainable. When I was an editorial assistant earning thirty thousand dollars a year, nobody had to tell me that there were quite literally hundreds of young women who would have been happy to take my place, because I already knew. Not only that, I knew many of those women would have been more financially able to survive on that kind of salary—women whose family lived in the city or who had parents who could subsidize their rent—but I was determined to make it work. So I did—on a diet of ninety-cent garlic bread and the free food I could scavenge from around the office.
While acknowledging problems with the modern workplace is one thing, solving these issues is another. Joining workers’ unions, advocating for better pay and improved rights, and setting boundaries around work hours and expectations can work to help find a solution, but there are no guarantees. And these pathways toward solutions often involve banding together with like-minded coworkers, further impressing the need for genuine workplace camaraderie.
In Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone,10 Sarah Jaffe writes that we have all been told that work itself is meant to bring us fulfillment, pleasure, meaning, and joy. “We’re supposed to work for the love of it, and how dare we ask questions about the way our work is making other people rich while we struggle to pay rent and barely see our friends,” she writes.
Much like the hierarchical nuclear family, workplace “families” can easily become dysfunctional and, in the worst instances, harmful. Jaffe believes that the modern expectation that we should all be “happy” at work demands emotional work from employees. “Work, after all, has no feelings,” she writes. “Capitalism cannot love. This new work ethic, in which work is expected to give us something like self-actualization, cannot help but fail.”
It’s not easy to be a mother in America. According to Forbes,11 the average cost of childbirth in the US is 18,865 dollars, with that cost rising to 26,280 dollars if a C-section is required. Before birthing parents return home from the hospital, they are overwhelmed, not just physically and emotionally, but financially too. And when it comes time to return to work (which American parents on average do sooner than parents living in similarly wealthy countries) things only get more difficult.
If you’re not yet a parent, these kinds of statistics and figures can be overwhelming, to say the least. In 2019, researchers from the University of Sydney asked young people to imagine what will be important to the future success of their work and families. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald,12 Elizabeth Hill, an associate professor in political economy at the University of Sydney, said that some women she spoke to in her research were actively deciding not to have kids after witnessing how many mothers struggle when returning to work.13 “There seems to be an emerging group of young women who look around at their female colleagues and their workplaces and decide it is too hard to have children and a successful work life,” Hill told the newspaper. In the US, things are no different, with a reported 33 percent14 of women believing it’s not viable to have a child while pursuing a career.
But what of those people who long to be parents and aren’t willing to sacrifice that dream to the modern workplace? For me, it’s one thing to acknowledge that parents, particularly those who have gone through pregnancy and childbirth, often return to a workplace that’s not designed to support them, but it’s another thing entirely to decide that the situation is so dire and unfixable that I’d give up having a child altogether. The corporate workplace wasn’t designed with parents in mind. But while we wait for our workplaces or the government to offer solutions, like flexible working hours, affordable child care, or federal paid parental leave, people must do what they can to find their own—whether that’s fair or not.
Cassandra Vozzo and Nikki Ronald, who have been friends for seven years, found an unexpected solution to balancing work and child care. After meeting while working on the same commercial sales team, they stayed in touch, even when Cass moved from the city back to her hometown after having her daughter, Ruby. One day, while talking on the phone, Cass mentioned a role she’d seen advertised and was thinking of applying for. As it turned out, Nikki, a mother of two, had already been in talks with a hiring manager about the same position. So, they hatched a plan.
“Nikki didn’t want to do five days a week and I was only open to working three or four, so we thought, why don’t we pitch a job share?” Cass tells me over the phone on her day off, after putting Ruby down for her midday nap. Together they worked on a presentation using examples of how job shares have worked for other people they knew in the industry, outlined their shared skill set, and highlighted the unique experience they’d each be able to bring to the table. In the past they’d worked in similar roles but had both since expanded their skills. They felt that the remote job share would be a way for the company to get all their experience combined, for the same price as one full-time salaried staffer. To them, it made sense for the company as well as their families, leaving them both with days off to care for their kids. The company agreed. They were hired.
When Cass and I speak, it’s been a year since her job share with Nikki began. As other working parents have told me, one issue that arises with part-time work is the difficulty that can come with being able to maintain boundaries on your days off. As part of their arrangement, Nikki works Monday and Tuesday solo, overlapping with Cass on Wednesday, before Cass works Thursday and Friday on her own. For Cass, hearing from Nikki on one of her days off isn’t as burdensome as it would be to hear from another colleague. “Because we’re friends, it’s fine for her to call me if she has a question. It can save her two hours of trying to figure something out,” Cass says. “I know some people might not work like that, but we do.”
Helping a friend at work will always feel more satisfying than helping a coworker you don’t have a relationship with, but for Nikki and Cass, that feeling is even more amplified. They need each other to succeed, so they can remain a package deal. For Cass, her friendship with Nikki is what helped her return to the workforce in a way that felt manageable and even exciting. Their friendship became a solution to a problem that nobody—not corporations nor the government—appeared to be rushing to fix.
There’s something magic about the closeness that can be found in a workplace friendship. For people working with others in person, rather than remotely, these connections can become the closest adult equivalent of friendships made at school, in university dorms or in shared apartments. When you spend most of your day sitting or standing beside someone, it’s easy to become accustomed to their habits, their likes and dislikes, and the tiny things that happen in their days, which they might not bother to mention to a friend outside work. When I’ve been close to friends at work, I’ve been privy to what they’ve dreamed about the night before, when they change their coffee order, when they have their period, when their hot water needs fixing, and what Airbnb they’re booking for their upcoming weekend away. There’s an intimacy that can only be found when occupying a physical space for so many hours a day. Shared with the right person, it can be precious.
Fourteen years into my career, many of my closest friends started as coworkers. The friends I’ve met at work, whether at the start of my career when I was still a teenager or now as I enter my thirties, make up a large portion of the friends who know me best. They were the people I was closest to—both physically and emotionally—when I first ran into my now long-term partner by chance at a party, when I became an aunt, when I started wearing glasses (a surprisingly big deal to me at the time), when I gave up meat for a year, and when a million other tiny but not insignificant events unfolded while I was at work. And while my work friends were there for so many moments that changed the course of my life, I was also there for theirs. Lunchtime walks, coffee runs, and tears in the bathroom on particularly bad days aside, there is a practicality that comes with work friendships. At work, making a new friend can mean finding someone to guide you, champion you and promote you. But the opposite can also apply. For people who start out as friends and then find themselves working together, there can be a completely different host of benefits.
When Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur met in 2002, they were both undergrads at the University of Chicago. Claire was a freshman and Erica a sophomore, but they were quickly introduced by someone they now both jokingly refer to as a mutual frenemy. “We were very much alike,” Claire tells me. “We had a lot in common and hit it off right away. I think we saw ourselves in each other.”
Through college, the friends never technically worked together but were involved in some of the same extracurriculars that helped re-create a microcosm similar to many workplaces. As they worked together to bring music acts to campus—a role they both took incredibly seriously—they each got to witness what the other would be like in their future workplaces. There were budgets to manage, big egos to navigate, and teams to lead. Beyond their many shared interests outside college, the two quickly understood they had similar working styles when trying to get stuff done.
Moving to New York after college, the friends had the same experience as many twentysomethings who move to the city, figuring out who they were now and who they wanted to become. But they were also navigating a world trying to rebuild after the financial crisis and, all of a sudden, the career prospects they’d dreamed of years ago no longer made sense. “It felt like seeing the writing on the wall and thinking, ‘Oh God, if things keep going down the track they’re on right now, what would that look like? What would my job be?’” says Erica. Feeling at a crossroads, it was inside their friendship that they found a solution to their uncertainty.
In 2010, Claire and Erica launched Of a Kind, a much-loved ecommerce store that not only sold everything from fashion to homewares, but helped designers and makers tell the stories of their work in their own words. It was a hit. In 2015, they sold the company to Bed, Bath & Beyond, but remained working on it until 2019, when they made the difficult decision to close up shop.
When I speak to the friends and founders, I’m curious to know how they decided to continue working together after closing Of a Kind. What was that conversation like? Claire tells me that the decision to stick together was made years earlier, when the company was going through a dark time. “We’d had a meeting near my apartment and were feeling so low. We went back to my place and lay on my bed,” she says. “And we were like, ‘What would we want to do if we shut down? What can we do?’ It was very clear, the only answer we wanted to figure out was how to work together. That was the most important thing.”
And so they did. Since closing Of a Kind, Erica and Claire have grown their podcast and newsletter and have started a consulting company. They’ve also coauthored a book, Work Wife: The Power of Female Friendship to Drive Successful Businesses.15 During our conversation, many of the benefits of starting a business with a friend become clear. They understand what’s constantly going on in each other’s lives and can empathize when that bleeds into work. They can offer a level of emotional support that would probably be strange coming from any other coworker. But they also acknowledge how rare it is to be so in the weeds of someone else’s life when you’re not in a romantic relationship, especially when it comes to finances. This phenomenon of going from friends to business partners with deep financial ties is something Erica and Claire explore in their book. “There’s something unique about the particular strain of non-romantic partnership that we’re in with each other—one that’s so deeply entwined in love, taxes and other practical matters that it requires shared bank accounts, a legally binding document and a couples counsellor,” they write. There may be no guidelines or contracts for friendship, but there are plenty of contracts in business, especially when your future success is as dependent on your friend as it is on your own instincts.
Claire tells me it was never an active decision to start a business with a friend. Rather, there’s nobody else in the world she would want to go into business with, except Erica, who feels the same. Knowing each other intimately as friends meant they’ve been able to avoid many of the downfalls they’ve witnessed in other business partnerships, which seem to come undone when there is competition between founders. The lack of competition in their friendship, and their deep trust in each other, as well as the work ethic they both witnessed in one another back in their college days, meant that Claire and Erica were able to found their first business already knowing they’d likely be able to avoid many of the pitfalls other cofounders find themselves in. For all these years, it’s their friendship that has helped their careers stay secure.
Beyond the five years I spent working in retail—and the few months I spent working as a “sandwich artist” before being unceremoniously fired at the age of fourteen—I’ve always worked in an office. My work friendships have been made over sad desk lunches, near-constant Slack DMs, and warm glasses of cheap white wine served at 4 PM on a Friday. But every job comes with the potential for friendship.
Tilly Lawless is a queer sex worker who started working in Australian massage parlors more than ten years ago. When we speak, Tilly tells me she now works primarily in brothels, which she prefers to working privately. In the brothel, she’s not responsible for her own advertising or space. She just shows up and works her shift, as she would in any other job. And like many other workplaces, there’s a manager, receptionist, and anywhere between five and twenty other women: her coworkers.
When Tilly and I connect to speak about her friendships at work, the conversations and situations she describes all take place in what she refers to as the girls’ room. “The vibe of the girls’ room dictates the entire vibe of the establishment, because you’re actually spending more time there than you are in actual bookings with clients,” she tells me. “If you have an eight-hour shift, you probably spend three hours with clients and five hours with the girls, so it really matters who you’re on shifts with, colleagues-wise.” Inside the room there can be lounges, a kitchenette, and a number of mirrors, which create small stations for the women to do their makeup and hair while getting ready to meet clients. When Tilly first started working in brothels, there would often be a TV switched on in one corner, but these days, she tells me, most women bring their own laptop along. The vibe of the girls’ room at night is more raucous, but in the daytime, Tilly, who is the author of the novel Nothing But My Body,16 says she’s more likely to keep to herself, reading a book or writing.
“Accelerated intimacy” is a term Tilly often uses when talking about the girls’ room. “Often it’s quite small and in others it’s fucking tiny. You’ll have three girls on one couch, three on another, and two girls shoved into the one armchair,” she says. “So, you get to know each other very fast.” For a lot of women in the industry, their coworkers are the only people who know what they do for work. And it’s not uncommon for women to withhold their real names from their coworkers in an attempt to separate their work life from their private life. Tilly tells me that many of the women she’s worked alongside have children and partners who don’t know what they do for work, so drawing boundaries between their work and personal life becomes a key to maintaining their privacy. Despite this, the joy, nurturing, and comfort of friendships are still possible.
“There’s a real solidarity in the girls’ room, a real feeling of support and protection,” Tilly says. “But you can know so much about these people and have such an insight into their life through this accelerated intimacy, then they’ll just disappear.” Tilly tells me it’s not uncommon to completely lose touch with someone if they decide to leave an establishment. If you’re lucky, you’ll run into a former friend years later, working somewhere new.
All friendship, of course, can be both situational and temporary, while still being real and impactful. A work friendship doesn’t need to blend into your personal life to be meaningful, just as you don’t need to be privy to coworkers’ lives outside work to be able to appreciate them in the workplace.
Once, during a shift, Tilly noticed one of her colleagues in the girls’ room crying after a booking with a difficult client. With a language barrier between them, Tilly simply placed a glass of water by the woman, hoping to offer what tenderness and care she could without using words. A few months later, Tilly found herself upset after seeing a different client. Within moments, the same woman placed a glass of water beside Tilly—a sign that her gesture months earlier had been seen, appreciated and was now being reciprocated. “That was so special to me, because we’d never spoken but we’d been able to develop a friendship—or a care or trust—between us anyway,” she tells me. “It’s a really beautiful thing to have this kind of intimacy, and we should all treasure it, regardless of whether or not it’s going to be long-lasting.”
When I speak to Rachel Morrison, PhD, an associate professor of management at the Auckland University of Technology who specializes in interpersonal relationships in the workplace, she tells me that there is often a single moment or event that transforms friendly colleagues into actual friends.
“There’s an idea that most people can identify a tipping point—an event, day, or conversation—where they’ve realized that what they previously thought to be a collegial relationship has crossed the line to being a genuine friendship,” she says. In an instant, I can bring so many to mind. When I found myself leaving the magazine office at the same time as my coworker, Julia, and we walked to the train together, opening up about who we were each very casually dating at the time, I knew it was the beginning of something. Years later, when I walked out of a New York office building for the last time after being laid off, carrying my desk plant in a cardboard box alongside Terri, Tom, and Rachel, I felt the same kind of seismic shift. Whether you’re working through messy company restructures, dealing with bad clients, waiting for a delayed flight, or being quite literally stranded on an island together, there are a million opportunities for work connections to tip forward and dive headfirst into friendship outside of the workplace. “Once you have passed that tipping point, the friendship will always be different,” says Morrison. I know this to be true, because it has been for me.
While I once imagined I’d be a high-flying career woman into my late sixties, I’m now sure I’d much rather retire as soon as I’m financially able (if that will ever even be possible). I’m not lazy or tired or failing, I just have a different understanding of where I find joy and meaning. I now know that when I find happiness at work, it’s less likely to come from a new job title or pay raise or free lunch than from the people I’m spending eight hours a day working alongside.
When we speak about work—our relationship to it and the relationships that exist within it—everyone has a different experience to share. However, the one consistent truth I have found in my years of having friends in the workplace, and speaking to people about their own, is that work friendships are what can make all the difference between quitting and staying, failing and succeeding, admitting defeat and finding a solution. While we wait for society to be better and fairer, leaning on our friends is our best chance to make it all, well, work.