I Thought I Wanted a Work Wife, Until I Got One
I thought I wanted a best friend at work. And then I met Rhonda.
Note: This true story was initially published years ago when I first started writing on Substack and almost nobody saw it. Since then, I’ve really wanted to edit, polish and re-publish for a larger audience. Similar personal essays of mine can be found here.
When I started sixth grade, the students from four neighboring elementary schools combined to attend the local public middle school. Knowing this meant an opportunity to reinvent myself, I made up a few rules to curb my social ineptitude that got me bullied in elementary school: gently smile to say hi (no maniacal waving), don’t tell babyish stories about my family, stop trying to be funny, and most importantly: only wear clothes adorned with butterfly motifs, because then I’d be known as the “butterfly girl” instead of something embarrassing.
Despite the failure of this manifesto, I took a similar approach at the age of twenty-six, when I started working for an advertising firm called Zapify. Although Zapify was a startup, it was the biggest company in my career history--about two hundred people, with multiple offices--so I knew that this workplace might also be an important social hub for me. I was part of a friend group at the time, but I felt more on the outskirts than an actual member, much younger than everyone else, and rarely taken seriously. My rules for Zapify were simple: don’t do anything weird, don’t get drunk at company events, ask other people about themselves a lot, and attend all the happy hours even when you’re tired. The mission: have a great group of girlfriends who liked me as much as I liked them, and who could open the door to fun gatherings and parties.
On my first day, the recruiter, Charlie, introduced me to my team, which consisted of my boss, Ji-hoon, and the other two salespeople, Derek and Jim. Nice as they were, I was not invested in making close friends with single men at work. I was ruthlessly scouting for women—a group of bubbly, energetic women who would say things like “Sunday funday!” and invite me and my husband Nick to a rooftop party with bottomless mimosas.
At lunch, I spotted my new friend group. Just like in middle school, I could easily tell they were the “cool kids” of the office. The ringleader was a woman around my age named Taryn who looked surprisingly normie for San Francisco--chunky highlighted bob, heavy eye makeup, weird purposefully-wrinkled mid-calf boots over skinny jeans that made her look a bit like Peter Pan meets Home Depot Karen--but I could tell she thought she was cool, as did everyone else, and as a result, so did I. Her sidekicks included a few of the other office-hot young women and one gay guy. I would manifest this into existence, I decided.
