Married to the Job

The Victorian etymology of a modern dynamic.

She’s the first person you check in with when you arrive. It’s with her that you grab a quick lunch during which you both vent about the indignities of the workday. When your boss does something embarrassing, it’s her eyes you seek, and when it’s time to sneak out for happy hour, it goes without saying that she’ll come with you. She’s not a plausible romantic interest, though the suggestion is there. You are dependent—possibly too much—on her emotional support within a context that perpetually degrades you. You call her your work wife, and here I must ask: Why? A 1933 story in the New York Times attributed the term office wife to the 19th-century British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, who had used it to describe an ideal relationship with a certain kind of special assistant. This was a person who served as an adviser-ghostwriter-schmoozer and absorbed, by osmosis, some of the politician’s power. According to Gladstone, the dynamic should mirror that of husband and wife, except both should be men. (Gladstone also had an actual wife, Catherine.) The term’s modern connotations are most often attributed to the journalist David Owen, who wrote a piece called “Work Marriage” for The Atlantic in 1987. Owen’s definition of work marriage is theoretically platonic, but he argues that a work wife is very much like a “home wife,” with the crucial distinction that she does not nag. His definition is also exclusively, exhaustingly heterosexist: “a relationship that exists between certain people of the opposite sex who work at the same place.” The female is the “wife” because that’s the only way the man can conceive of her presence at work; no matter her rank or title, her primary role is to support him. As workplaces have become less egregiously hostile to women, the term’s meaning has morphed. Sometime since the late 1980s, work wife and work husband became terms we used to describe our friends— ostensibly our equals—at work. That we’ve adopted this language for co-workers reflects an overidentification with our jobs. Perhaps friend felt insufficient for those people we relied on to make workaholism survivable. In 2019, the Times ran a “Modern Love” column by a self-identified straight woman who complained that her “work wife,” a lesbian to whose flirtatious attention the author felt entitled, had made a new woman friend at work. The column served as a cringey reminder that work marriages, like real ones, can suffer from one-sidedness and acrimonious endings. While real marriages require some effort to untangle, work marriages can vanish as abruptly as a closed email account. Someone is fired or quits, and that’s that.