I have shared an office and a train home five days a week for 20 years with a chap I’ll call T. He calls me his “work wife”.
He does have a real wife and family. I’m many years divorced. Our relationship is very sibling-ish, and we’ve become, over the years, very close – we share things we don’t share with our “real” friends and family and just by virtue of the time spent together, we have shared a lot of our lives. We have never socialised outside work, aside from at work functions, and have never been to each other’s homes.
The thing is, we’re both retiring this year. And the chances are we will not see each other again, since that’s not the relationship we have. And I know I will miss him.
I’ll miss the everyday closeness, the banter, the laughs, the rants. I imagine he feels the same at some level (we don’t talk about things like that). How does one navigate ending relationships like this? Because I know it’ll end – it’s not that we don’t have all kinds of things in common, but without the framework of work, would we have anything real?
It’s the only drawback to retirement for me. I have other (female) work friends who I know I will see because we do socialise outside of work anyway, but I shall miss T. Any suggestions for finding a way to maintain a relationship, or should I just accept that this is one of the things that retirement does, and let it go?
I went to psychotherapist Chris Mills. We talked about these intense friendship one can have, as work colleagues, neighbours, school-run friends, anything which exists, as you say, within a “framework”; what happens when that goes?
Work, especially, gives us an excuse to cultivate very close friendships that, outside the “office” may require more explanation or may just not be possible. It’s a safe way, as Mills says, to get very close to someone. “In a way,” he says, “we protect ourselves with this frame we put around certain friendships.”
Mills also feels it was key that the one person you could be discussing this with, you’re not. “There seems to be a certain amount of fear around what could happen if you tried to change this friendship, and take it outside work. In this situation, work is like the parent, it has allowed you a boundary so you haven’t had to think about your friendship. Now that is about to end, it’s up to both of you what happens next.”
Can you maintain this friendship outside of work? Perhaps. It’s certainly worth trying isn’t it? Because it sounds like you both get on really well. But will you be “allowed” to? A lot depends on how he feels, and his wife feels about your friendship. Despite living in a supposedly enlightened society, heterosexual men and women being “just” friends is still difficult for some people to come to terms with; a lot seems to depend on cultural norms (when I left London for the countryside, very few people I met had opposite sex friends, only people they played sport with or had another “framework” they could define their relationship by).
“There’s going to be a massive loss of routine when you stop work,” says Mills, “so I imagine the potential loss of him is intertwined with that.” You seem perfectly OK about retirement and seem to have a good life outside of it, but it is a big life stage and one I think you should allow yourself to feel.
Mills says: “You could suggest something like ‘why don’t we meet for lunch in three months’ time after we’ve retired?’ You could do it in a very fun, light way, not a heavy ‘we need to form a new friendship’ thing. If he says no that’s a disappointment but you’ll know. If he says yes that may determine for both of you that there is something you both want to continue.”
Nearer the time, said Mills, you may also be the one who backs out. If you do do lunch “you may find you’ve only got the past to talk about. But it could just be like one book closing and another opening. Either way you’ll know, and won’t be wondering for the rest of your life.” So it’s definitely worth a try.
Be brave. Do it, and please keep us posted.
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