A field guide to growing up without growing apart

Work Friends vs. Real Friends

Work Friends vs. Real Friends

It’s an age old struggle. Making friends at work. At first you feel like the awkward new kid and you spend a month or two trying to worm your way into the social ladder of your workplace. Depending on where you work this can be easier or harder. All workplaces are very cliquey. You  think and hope that you will eventually grow past the obnoxious cliqueiness of high school, but let’s be real– that doesn’t happen. Cliques are everywhere. But supposing you eventually find your niche, another quandary inevitably surfaces. Should your work friends stay work friends, or do they become your real friends? How do you transition between one and the other? Or is it just easier to avoid the friends question all together?

I am a very outgoing person and I tend to make friends at work fairly easily. I’m one of those who never fully prescribes to just one clique but kind of hops between them all. I like to believe that I can get along with most people. I always find a few people for whom I genuinely care and decide that I would love to see them outside of work. But that’s when it gets tricky. There is something about making concrete plans outside of the workplace that inevitably becomes difficult. In my line of work it’s usually having opposite schedules. Even if we want to hang out, it never works because they are opening and I’m closing. I have one work friend who works the graveyard shift. He has expressed a desire to hang out multiple times but it never works. And then on the one day our day off lined up, he flaked out on me. But I wasn’t actually upset about it, I was kind of relieved.

So often the self we present at work isn’t exactly the same as our outside work self. It can be a huge risk to hang out outside of the comfortable work bubble. What if we find we have nothing to talk about except work?  Or what if the opposite is true?   One of my colleagues hangs out with another coworker outside work all the time. They have a lot in common. But yet, she has also confided in me that she thinks this person has a terrible work ethic and hates being on the same shift with her because she has to pick up all the slack! Talk about awkward! I once went to a movie with a coworker who I wasn’t very fond of because she invited me and I didn’t want to be mean. Turns out we had a great time! She’s really nice in real life, but she is super annoying at work! What do you do with that?

This is a problem that seems to get more complicated the older I get. When you’re a kid/young adult working a job you don’t really care about with a bunch of other kids who feel the same, it’s not that hard. Everyone just wants to have a good time and you are already together. There is an absence of tension and you can become real friends without much of an issue. But the bigger the stakes get in your professional world, the harder this becomes. You care a lot more about offending people, and relationships become strategic. Who’s good side do you need to be on? I hate those kind of relationships almost as much as I hate the word networking. Sometimes I wish we could go back to the days where offering to share your snack pack with someone was all you needed to be good friends.



1 thought on “Work Friends vs. Real Friends”

  • I see your point, but I also think you might be overthinking it a bit. I know you make friends easily, so I say if there are people at work you enjoy and want to be friends with, go for it. You’re not the kind of person to create drama, so I bet you could be friends with pretty much everyone at work and that would only make it more fun to work there.

    There have definitely been times when I felt like an outsider at work, but thankfully my current workplace doesn’t have too many cliques. The only issue is that the majority of the staff live in the same place (same apartment buildings, even) so they see each other a lot outside of school, and therefore are better friends. I live 30 minutes away and don’t have my own transportation, so it’s hard to join in on activities with them outside of work. Still, I think I get along with everybody well enough, but I haven’t made any true, life-long friends at this job–yet! But building relationships is pretty much always worth it. I should try harder at that.

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