Dear Prude, do I have to be friends with everyone?
"Is it okay for me to hang out with certain coworkers but not invite others?"
Dear Prude,
I work in an office with many other people around my age. I have become especially close to several co-workers, and we regularly hang out outside of work. There are other people at work who I get along well with, but I have no interest in getting closer with them. The problem is, we all work closely together and it is becoming clear that there are real friendships forming between some but not all of the people on our team. My question is: are cliques okay at work? Is it okay for me to hang out with certain coworkers but not invite others? Or should I keep work relationships fully professional and look for friendships elsewhere?
Sincerely,
Not Here to Make Friends… But Maybe I Am
Dear Not Here to Make Friends,
As an adult, finding friends is hard work. It’s not like the first day in a new classroom as a kid when the possibilities feel endless and everyone is a potential friend, enemy, or crush. As kids we found friendships with ease. Remember when you could become friends with a kid swimming in the pool on vacation? We were so flexible but, as time goes on, most of us stiffen up a bit. Maybe— if you’re lucky like me— you still have strong friendships going on ten or fifteen years. The bar to make new friends might feel high, which means we sometimes retreat into what feels comfortable and avoid taking the risk with new people. As adults, we aren’t in school with the same kids year after year, we aren’t dragged on vacations that make us so bored we look around for an ally, and we don’t ever really have to spend that much time with people we don’t like. Except at the office.
In an office, we are thrown back into a social setting where you spend every day with the same people. N.H.T.M.F., it sounds like you’re lucky and have found yourself in a work environment with people you really like and you get to work closely together. Most of us don’t initially select our careers with criteria like friends at work in mind but I would argue it should be an important career goal for everyone. Liking and respecting the people you work closest with and feeling that they understand you is one of the biggest factors in whether work feels fulfilling or just like a chore. When you have genuine connections with coworkers, collaboration flows more easily, challenges feel more manageable, and long days don’t seem quite as draining.
I’ve recommended office jobs as a solution to a number of friends who either felt isolated or too entrenched in their ways. And it’s not just the chance to make friends and work collaboratively. I think there is a lot of value to be gained from not quite getting along with some of your coworkers. Sure, this is only potentially positive if you work well and enjoy the company of most of your coworkers. But here’s the thing, by the time most of us arrive at the workplace, we have friends from childhood, friends from college, friends of friends in the city we moved to. What we’re really missing in adulthood is enemies: people whose politics we don’t quite understand, people who we just don’t click with, people who make an off-color comment every once and a while, people we just have nothing in common with. I could go on and on. I really believe this is the curative aspect of the modern workplace and I think it can be applied as a very effective treatment for a lot of general malaise.
Reader, you are very thoughtfully concerned about what to do when you don’t get along with everyone and I promise I will get to what to do to keep the peace. But first I want to point out that not liking everyone is an crucial part of life and one that should be looked at positively. It is incredibly important that we can understand, talk with, and work with people we don’t really like or have anything in common with. A social life with just the people you love and make you feel completely at ease is sort of diminished. Because we don’t really get the chance to test our characters, our values, and our place in the broader world until we take ourselves out of isolation and take life in as it comes to us.
So congratulations, you are in one of life’s necessary cruxes. Now what to do? First, a point that I could write a whole second response about, not all your friendships at work have to be as close as your friendships outside of work. You ask if maybe you should just keep your workplace friendships more professional. My general advice would be yes. But sometimes you click with someone incredibly well or you’ve moved to a city where you don’t have a lot of other friends and your workplace becomes a critical opportunity to meet new people. So I’ll modify my hardline stance to say, there are absolutely exceptions but make sure you know for yourself where you are drawing the line between friendly coworker and close friend. We are all slightly different people at work than we are in private. Even in less corporate environments, we need to show up to work as professional people with career goals and sometimes that’s not entirely in line with the person we are at home.
This division is going to be important for you when you decide how you are going to relate to the coworkers you’re less close to. Because you need to decide, are the coworkers I feel the closest to becoming my close friends? Will you hang out with them on the weekend and show them the less flattering sides of yourself? Or are they the coworkers you want to get lunch with and share company gossip, but you’re happy to leave those interactions confined to the workplace? If they are the former, then maybe it’s time to start taking certain aspects of your friendship outside of the workplace entirely. If they’re more the latter, you might need to suck it up and invite the others.
You mention spending time outside of the office so I’ll assume you are forming close and important friendships. You don’t need to step away from them to spare the feelings of others, but during work might not be a good time to demonstrate your closeness. Make an effort to include others in more work-related activities like happy hours, secret santa, etc. No need to mention weekend activities and close hang outs to the broader group. Because, again, we don’t need to bring all parts of ourself to the workplace. Sure, there might be some tricky moments but, again, that’s important. Learning how to navigate those moments with grace in order to maintain good working relationships and nurture a rich personal life is going to be enlivening. This is the part that’s a lot like being a kid in a classroom again; we don’t get to choose who we’re around. We have to know and be known by everyone. But there is a lot of potential there to get to know yourself better. Try to enjoy it!