The “Work Spouse” Is Dead

By Erin Mantz, Founder, Gen X Girls Grow Up

The “Work Spouse” has gone the way of water cooler chitchat, daily coffee runs with coworkers, and spontaneous commiseration. And that should make a lot of people sad. As a Generation X worker who experienced life in different company offices across three decades, I’ve seen a lot of changes! Now, the human aspect has taken a hit, and some generations will feel this loss more than others. The sanity-saving “work spouse” — often an opposite-sex co-worker who was always simply and literally there for a daily vent or pep talk is now simply…gone.

When it comes to a Work Spouse, is it better to have loved and lost — — or to have never loved at all? I mourn the fact Gen Z and my teenage kids may never have one.

Post-pandemic, our world is remote and different. It’s much more isolating for a Gen X girl who had decades of in-person interaction (the good and the bad). I’m saying this…and I’m an introvert!

I found my first Work Spouse as I was fighting with a stubborn fax machine in the 1990s. He laughed at me as I swore at the machine, then came over and showed me I had the piece of paper backwards. He made me laugh at myself. After that day, I had a Work Spouse almost everywhere I went for the next 25 years. They saved my sanity.

Hell hath no fury like someone flying out of the office for a venting session with a work spouse. It was more than a sense of camaraderie. Rob, Fred, Frank, Demetrius and Mike were lifelines, five days a week. Gen Z may never understand how critical Work Spouses were day to day, after long commutes in and before frustrating commutes home. An eye roll, a knowing glance, a raised eyebrow — and I don’t mean emojis on Slack — these were the heartbeats of our relationships.

Lately, I find myself more nostalgic than ever. It’s a kind of missing link that seems hard to get over. After all, we didn’t separate over differences or disappointments with one another. The pandemic broke the bonds and limited opportunities to laugh (at others, and at ourselves).

Oh, the drama we discussed! We fumed about infuriating coworkers via five-minute rants on coffee runs. Sipping a vanilla soy latte, I felt validated and heard. And we even turned stressful situations around, before they almost got the better of us. We lived through layoffs of team members we loved and backstabbing attempts by those we never trusted in the first place. We supported one another when bosses had breakdowns before our eyes and when we had to stay creative on late night deadlines.

One boss had me lie to clients that he wasn’t in the office — for three weeks straight — even though he was sitting right there. He didn’t like people. As he sat there ruminating about some strategy and waited for his pepperoni pizza to arrive each day, my work spouse and I would roll our eyes at our desks. This was all annoying. But when that same boss questioned if a new employee’s grandma really died and he needed the day off for the funeral, that boss typed “Dead Grandma?” into the guy’s screen saver. Afraid I’d show my shock and disgust, I grabbed my Work Spouse and went to Starbucks.

There were days I wanted to scream, like when someone forgot to use Track Changes or re-edited the same version twice. There were times a manager came in cranky when she was fighting with her boyfriend — which was basically every day. In my earliest days, I’d grab my work spouse, an avid smoker, and we’d hide in the stairwell for a quick chat. Over the decades, cigarettes went out of style, but the work spouse never did — until now.

Business travel took the commiseration to a whole new level. When a work event meant staying across the country and away from my kids for a week, my work spouse listened to me contradict myself over nightly dirty martinis. I talked about how much I loved my kids, but how happy I was to not have to make school lunches the next morning.

If it sounds like these Work Spouse chats were sinister, they really weren’t. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t the crazy one. I was just trying to get through the days.

Today, there’s no Work Spouse to escape with or to. Most of us are at home, and most of us have never even met. There’s no “there” there — no memories, no moments of real connection, no basis for trust. Without a Work Spouse to confide in or commiserate with, many other Generation X workers I know feel frustated. Whether our worries are big business things or little personal ones, thoughts pile up. I’m no psychiatrist, but I don’t think this is good for our emotional well-being. I worry about younger generations.

In typical Gen X fashion, I should probably just say “Whatever” and call upon my sense of independence and resiliency. But I mourn the death of the Work Spouse. For decades, they made work — and life — more fun, more bearable, and less lonely. I don’t think I’ll ever get that back. Like double spaces after periods, they’re hard for us to hold onto.

On particularly trying days, I think about them. I imagine what they’d say to make me smile or rethink my attitude. I saw things more clearly through their eyes. I was able to laugh at others, and, more importantly, I was able to laugh at myself. Work Spouses were never a benefit listed in a New Hire brochure, but they were the best part of work, and the best part of my professional-meets-personal self.

#generationx #genx #generationz #genz #workspouse #gengirl #remotework