Many of us feel like our lives are simply work, eat, sleep, repeat. This cycle can become incredibly monotonous, so if there’s anything you can do to make it more exciting, it’s perfectly understandable to try. And if that means getting close to your colleagues, so you don’t feel bored out of your mind for 40 hours a week, that’s great! Just make sure that your work relationships don’t start interfering with your personal life…
One woman recently reached out to Reddit asking for advice after deciding that she doesn’t want her fiancé’s “work wife” attending their wedding. Below, you’ll find the full story that she posted, as well as some of the replies that invested readers shared.
This woman’s fiancé has a “work spouse” that he’s extremely close to
Image credits: Max Harlynking (not the actual photo)
But she’s decided that she doesn’t want his work wife anywhere near their wedding
Image credits: Getty Images (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Getty Images (not the actual photo)
Image source: SnooAdvice5677
Being close with colleagues can make the workday much more enjoyable
It’s important to be professional at work, but if you can manage to make friends in the office, that can make the hours pass much faster. You can share memes on Slack throughout the day, grab lunch together at the café on the corner and have an ally if you ever need someone to have your back during a meeting. In fact, having a friend at work can even boost your mood and your motivation, Forbes reports.
But what about having a “work spouse”? According to Fortune, a whopping 72% of office workers in the UK say they have a work wife or husband. These relationships don’t only include discussing work issues, though.
A fifth of these employees say that they know everything about their work spouse’s personal life, and nearly a quarter admit that they would rather discuss emotional topics with their work spouse than their romantic partner.
However, these work marriages can sometimes create issues in and out of the workplace. One issue that might arise is other team members starting to feel excluded or uncomfortable. If two employees are incredibly close, their relationship might also spark rumors amongst the rest of the staff.
While having a close bond with someone at work can benefit the two work spouses, it can also cause them to lose their objectivity in the office and start viewing their best friend’s work through a biased lens.
And, of course, it can make each work spouse’s actual romantic partner incredibly uncomfortable. After all, we spend about 40 hours working each week, which might be even more time than office employees get to spend with their actual partners (if we don’t count sleeping hours).
But it’s important to set boundaries to ensure work relationships don’t interfere with your personal life
Marriage.com notes that there are advantages to having a close ally at work, as you’ll always have someone to vent to and someone to reduce your stress during the work day. They might even make your job more fun, and depending on their role, your work spouse could potentially open up doors for your career.
But it’s important to remember that there are risks to having a husband or wife at work too. You might become the subject of workplace gossip, and your work spouse might start to overstep the boundaries of your relationship, leading to an uncomfortable working environment.
Now, having a work spouse in and of itself is not cheating, Marriage.com notes, but it can become dangerous when a work friendship starts bleeding into an emotional affair.
If someone is spending time thinking about their work spouse outside of working hours, that might be a red flag. If they’re opening up to one another about things that they wouldn’t tell their actual partner, that’s not a good sign. And if the work spouse starts to interfere with your actual relationship, it might be time to shut it down.
VeryWell Mind explains that emotional affairs can erode trust in a relationship, can cause difficulty when forming future relationships, can lead to feelings of guilt, shame or anger, can reduce self-confidence, can hurt communication between partners and can sometimes even result in divorce. If you notice that you or your partner are engaging in an emotional affair, it will be crucial to set boundaries, communicate openly and focus on spending time with one another.
We would love to hear your thoughts on this situation in the comments below, pandas. Do you think it’s appropriate for this man to have a work wife? Feel free to weigh in, and then check out this Bored Panda article discussing similar issues!
Many readers took the bride’s side and called out her partner for his inappropriate behavior
However, some thought that the bride was in need of a reality check, noting that both she and her fiancé were in the wrong
The post Woman Shocked At Fiancé’s Work Wife’s Audacity: “You Could Always Marry Me Instead” first appeared on Bored Panda.
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