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I envy those who have bff at work. Even if someone is friendly to me it is hard to let my guard down at the office. I hope I get some antidepressants soon as I hate those bad moods.
Work colleagues are not your friends...they are just someone you work with. Occasionally someone might find a match, it does happen. But I wouldn't expect it.
Judith Viorst wrote a book where she mentioned having friends in places...meaning you might have work friends that does not go outside work, historical friends such as your friend from kindergarten but whom you rarely see, true friends where you share it all, or
friends at the gym who you'd never see in a social situation.
Don't worry about it...get getting along should be the work goal.
Now depression is another issue, check out the many depression threads.
I envy those who have bff at work. Even if someone is friendly to me it is hard to let my guard down at the office. I hope I get some antidepressants soon as I hate those bad moods.
Why? Do you have trouble making friends? Making friends at work is actually a fairly rare occurrence, OP. Work is not a place to socialize. It's not at all unusual to not hit it off with work colleagues. The important thing is to get along at least well enough to be able to get your job done.
The whole thing of work environment as surrogate family was kind of a 60's meme, that was never realistic. It mainly involved single working women. I guess it was the best the sit-com writers could come up with, in that era, lol.
If you convince yourself you're somehow missing out on something, then you'll make yourself miserable, by thinking you're deprived. You're messing with your own mind. Instead, look for community activities to join, where you can make friends: hobby groups, Meetups, classes of various sorts, volunteering, whatever.
I envy those who have bff at work. Even if someone is friendly to me it is hard to let my guard down at the office. I hope I get some antidepressants soon as I hate those bad moods.
Ending up with a bff at your workplace can happen, but it's less likely than finding that friend at some activity you enjoy away from work. Think about it....the things you have in common with colleagues is that you spend 8 hours every workday in the same place or that you have the same technical training and responsibilities your coworkers do. Can you have a friend at work? Sure. Is it some requirement for being considered a normally functional human being? No. There's a huge difference between being pleasant and comfortable around the people you work with and having close relationships with them.
Occasionally I ended up being close friends with a coworker, but usually the important things we had in common would have brought us together no matter where we met. Chance just threw us together for enough time to realize it. You can end up finding a great friend anywhere....one of mine turned out to be the driver of my evening commuter bus. We enjoyed each other so much we'd sit and talk at the end of her route every day (it was her evening shift lunch break).
If you roam around on the Work and Employment forum you'll find many viciously cynical debates over being friends with coworkers...and I mean amazingly so. There are usually two camps participating; the camp that rants about never ever under any circumstances be friends with anyone at a workplace (because they'll stab you in the back), and the camp that expects everyone to drop work and behave like social gadflies during office hours (work is less important than getting advantages out of the people there) or you'll never make a success of your career. Most people fall somewhere in the hugely wide middle. It's no crime.
Work colleagues are not your friends...they are just someone you work with. Occasionally someone might find a match, it does happen. But I wouldn't expect it.
Judith Viorst wrote a book where she mentioned having friends in places...meaning you might have work friends that does not go outside work, historical friends such as your friend from kindergarten but whom you rarely see, true friends where you share it all, or
friends at the gym who you'd never see in a social situation.
Don't worry about it...get getting along should be the work goal.
Judith Viorst's definition sounds right. I have friends at work, but I've always thought of them as work friends as she does. We'll do small talk on hobbies and big life events (like buying a new car, house hunting, etc.) and talk over work problems, but I wouldn't discuss health problems or other personal problems or go into any deep discussion with them. I don't spend time texting them or socializing with them outside of work. When I change jobs, I don't keep in contact with them. They're friends only in the sense that I'm way more friendly and familiar with them than other people I work with.
I agree with greatblueheron that you shouldn't be too worried about not making "work friends" or "true friends" at work. You most likely don't have much in common with your coworkers and it'll be harder to relate to some of them if there's a large age gap (i.e. you're in different stages of your life). It's really not a good place to find friends.
There can actually be disadvantages to having close friends at work anyway, like if your "friendship" sours for any reason, you still have to work with them instead of cutting them out of your life. (I let a work friend borrow something expensive from me once. They ended up not using it, but their husband removed a bunch of important pieces from it for some reason. They spent three months "looking" for the missing pieces before buying me a new one. I was pissed the entire three months and having to be professional toward them sucked.)
Second, you can still have a friendly relationship with someone while still not sharing every intimate detail of your personal life. If you're not being friendly back, that's rude.
Third, look for friends elsewhere.
Fourth, getting antidepressants for this is a really bad, dumb idea.
Very, very few and I mean very few people develop real long term friendships with coworkers. With one exception the real friends I had at work were friends I helped get a job with the County or I knew outside of work before they got hired. Such is life in small town America.
OP it is not you. Work buddies will probably not see each other after one leaves the office. Your OK
I have never made friends at work, and the one time I witnessed it (my husband and his immediate supervisor), it was not good, imo. There is always the idea "he's the boss", so it was very unequal -- and the one time, we let down our guard and treated he and his wife as our social equals, he and his wife let us down very badly -- and the hurt and disappointment of that carried over to the rest of the time he and my husband were at the same company. (Our son had died, and he and his wife decided not to attend the memorial service. This was especially painful, as my husband and I are introverts with no close family, and so their absence was particularly missed.)
Now perhaps if it was truly a case of equals being friends, that might be different, but it has never happened for me.
I've also never had friends at work. In my 6 jobs since graduating from college, there was only one where I was even fairly sociable with my coworkers. We'd eat lunch together in the lunch room every day and make jokes, talk sports, etc, but I haven't seen them outside work since I left. All the others I rarely socialize with my coworkers, except some small talk. I think making small talk and maybe eating lunch together is the norm for social interactions at work. Making true friends at work is the exception, not the rule, from what I've seen.
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