Work friends

SOME YEARS AGO, a very close colleague called me up and told me he was taking an offer elsewhere. I had known he was interviewing, and both knew and understood his reasons for looking, so I was not surprised. And I was, genuinely, happy for him—it was a good opportunity, and he was right to take it.

But man was it ever a bummer.

A lot has been said about the ways in which our society fails to support us in forming meaningful friendships outside of the workplace. I think that’s fair, and I think we have a lot to do to rebuild community infrastructure in other areas of our lives. Not to reconstruct the old institutions—which were, in many cases, rightly abandoned—but to make something new among the ruins. But I also fervently believe that while work shouldn’t be the only place to make friends, it’s also not a place where friendship should be proscribed.

It’s true that work friendship can become a vector for exploitation, insomuch as an unscrupulous employer can prey on isolated workers by threatening those relationships. But the reverse—choosing to rebuff even the possibility of friendship among your colleagues—is no guarantee of fairness. And it is, I think, a rejection of the things that make us alive: the ability to find joy and connection and even love with the other people that we happen to meet, whether those meetings occur in our apartment buildings or on our blocks, at the gym or at the bar, or in an office or company Slack.

More importantly, we don’t have to avoid making work friends in order to minimize our exploitability. We can, instead, take them with us.

I don’t recall which of us suggested it first, but after my colleague started their new gig, we restored our old one-on-ones to our respective calendars. And we kept them up. We’ve now been work friends for over ten years, but we only worked in the same organizations for the first half of that decade. It is not possible for an employer to exploit our relationship, because it exists outside of their reach. We are not constrained or limited by either of our jobs. There’s no tradeoff between being colleagues and staying or leaving, because wherever either of us goes, the other one is always near.

Over the years, we’ve supported each other through big and small decisions. We’ve bounced ideas, asked for gut checks, vented our frustrations, brainstormed solutions to tricky problems, hypothesized about what the hell is happening in the world and in our work. We’ve listened; we’ve shared. We’ve called each other out on our bullshit more times than I can count. We’ve done what work friends do: support, encourage, and challenge each other to work and live better than we have before.

I’ve watched and lived through these past few years, with all the attrition and layoffs, with a sense of dismay and dread and fear for the future. But I’ve also observed work friendships leaping over those obstacles: exile Signal groups lighting up, recurring calls transferred to personal calendars, former colleagues becoming forever colleagues. It’s one of the things that gives me a lot of hope for this particular moment in time. Perhaps the challenge facing us now isn’t to avoid making work friends, but to inoculate those friendships against the capriciousness of both good job offers and investor brain worms. We don’t have to cut ourselves off from each other; we can take our work friends to-go.