Do you think it's normal to have a ‘work wife’ and a ‘work husband’

It often begins as a regular office friendship. You share lunch, trade jokes in the hallway, and bond over an oddly specific hobby like escape rooms, board games, or birding. Over time, you both become fluent in each other’s work gripes. A steady stream of venting turns into a reel of inside jokes that lightens the day. The conversations drift into life outside the office. Sometimes you do not need words at all. One pointed look can save you from an overlong chat with a chatty colleague. There is nothing romantic going on, yet you can understand why people might wonder.

The label that tends to stick to this bond is work wife or work husband. In 2015, communications scholars M. Chad McBride and Karla Mason Bergen described a “work spouse” as a special, platonic friendship at work defined by a close emotional bond, generous self-disclosure, and mutual trust, honesty, loyalty, and respect. Other researchers place it in the gray space between friendship and romance. Defining the relationship is tricky. Naming it is trickier. Why do two people who are not married, and may not be interested in each other romantically, reach for the words husband and wife?

The phrase made more sense in its earliest form. “Office wife” appears in the late 19th century, when former U.K. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone used it to describe the unity of purpose between a minister and his male secretary. As clerical roles feminized, the term shifted to secretaries who managed a boss’s daily burdens at work much like a wife managed the household. Popular culture amplified the idea. Faith Baldwin’s 1929 novel The Office Wife turned the triangle of boss, spouse, and secretary into a story of temptation. The trope later fell out of favor as secretaries pushed back against the caretaker role and feminist scholars such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter critiqued the gendered power dynamics that “office marriages” reinforced.

The relationship did not vanish. It changed shape. By the late 1980s, in step with evolving views of marriage and workplace equality, the dynamic looked more like an egalitarian partnership. In a 1987 essay, David Owen described a new office marriage that could exist between peers, not a boss and an assistant, and that could remain firmly platonic. Part of the appeal, he argued, came from the boundaries. You could confide in a work spouse about your real partner without bringing home habits or domestic irritations into the office. The intimacy felt safe because it was circled by clear professional limits.

Today, a work spouse does not need to be of a different gender. McBride and Bergen’s research suggests the bond still often forms with someone of the gender one is attracted to, but it is not a rule. You do not need a legal spouse to have a work spouse, though many do. The dynamic has shed many of its old stereotypes. The term, curiously, has survived.

The urge to give a relationship like this a clear label is understandable. Words like sister and colleague help people inside and outside the bond make sense of it. Less traditional ties demand even more explanation, as Illinois State University communication professor Aimee Miller-Ott notes. Kinship language becomes convenient because everyone knows what it signals. Anthropologist Janet Carsten points out that family metaphors are “handy” framing tools. Yet, as UCLA anthropologist Dwight Read observes, people usually borrow words for blood relations, not marital ones, when labeling nontraditional relationships. Outside of some straight women who affectionately call a best friend “wifey,” using husband or wife for a platonic cross-sex friendship is rare. The researchers interviewed for this topic struggled to find other examples.

The persistence of marital terms may simply echo the old office-wife trope, as University of Alabama professor Marilyn Whitman suggests. It also makes intuitive sense. Work marriages often involve compatibility, durability, and a sense of exclusivity. Those traits also describe strong friendships. The trouble is that friend has lost some precision. In the social media era, friend can mean anything from confidant to casual acquaintance. At work, where warmth is moderated by professionalism, genuine closeness stands out. Add longstanding discomfort with close male-female ties and the natural suspicion that proximity breeds romance, and it is easy to see why outsiders might misread the bond. Some people avoid the label in public for that reason. Others, Miller-Ott suspects, use the phrase strategically. Combining work with wife or husband can broadcast two ideas at once. The relationship is unusually close. The relationship is not romantic. The monogamy implied by the word spouse hints that boundaries exist and that those looser rules of office decorum apply only within this pair.

That approach only half succeeds. Husband and wife reliably signal intimacy and singularity. They also imply sex and romance. Carsten finds it a bit amusing that spousal language could be used to dampen rumors of dating. You cannot borrow some connotations of a word and ignore the rest. People seem to understand this. In Miller-Ott’s interviews, many pairs used the labels only in private. Others rejected them entirely because they worried a real partner would object, a pattern Whitman and researcher James Mandeville also found.

For some, the slight whiff of taboo is part of the charm. A label that nudges up against propriety can make the bond feel more special. That may be why colleagues who would never use the terms in public still do so behind closed doors. The language itself becomes a small in-group ritual. Yet the term also fails for the same reason it works. Work spouse borrows the exclusivity and status of marriage to describe something that is, at its core, different. The closeness is real, the trust is real, and the boundaries are real. The metaphor is doing heavy lifting that friendship, care, and clarity could already handle.