The theme tune from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho plays as a woman clasps her hand over her mouth in shock. The camera flips, and a greeting card comes into focus. She zooms, and the first few words become clear: “For my work wife on Valentine’s Day.” She moves closer, revealing more of the message: “I’ve finally found someone just as inappropriate as me!”
This TikTok video, captioned “@CardFactoryUK fuming sort it out xx”, has more than 400,000 likes. A similar post on X has been viewed 5.4 million times. And man, do the comments reveal a lot about where we’re all at with the concept of work spouses (and what constitutes cheating).
“The only context this is cute in is for two people who aren’t married and just have a crush at work, calling them a work husband as a joke or being flirty. In all other contexts, it’s gross.”
“I feel like this is fine if neither of them have SOs. But if they did??”
“My husband comes home with one of those cards he's never going back there.”
“The term work wife/ husband is weird asf.”
So many people think it’s a major red flag if you’re straight and your partner has a work spouse (someone who they work and share a close, strictly platonic bond with) of a different gender. Some go so far as to call it “emotional cheating”, “unacceptable”, “divorce-worthy”, and “evil”.
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It’d be easy to dismiss this as yet another social media sh*tstorm that’ll be forgotten in a week. But a 2023 poll found that a lot of people genuinely are not OK with their partner having a work spouse — 57% of millennials, 39% of Gen Zs, and 40% of boomers. We’re not talking about cheating here. Their partner simply having a close friend of another gender at work was the thing they weren’t comfortable with.
The concept (and criticism) of work spouses has been around for decades. No one ever argues that straight people in relationships can’t have a work spouse of their own gender. But this particular 2025 edition of the discourse comes from a place of deep heteronormativity. One where the underlying belief is that people of different genders can never be “just friends”. Considering we’re now all obsessed with therapy, pride ourselves on emotional intelligence, and value trust and honest communication in our relationships, it makes zero sense.
Historically, traditional gender roles meant that men and women didn’t mix at work. They only really hung out if they were family, romantic partners, or friends with each other’s spouse. Any male/female relationship that existed outside of those contexts would have been thought of as weird or suspicious.
You’d think we’d have moved past this, but these things are often so ingrained in us that they’re unconscious. Pop culture doesn’t help. It consistently cements the message that men and women can’t be mates without secretly wanting to f*ck each other. Just think how many films and TV shows feature a friends-to-lovers / will-they-won’t-they storyline. From Friends to The X-Files, to Bridgerton, no genre is safe. They all eventually end up together.
Why do we treat our relationships with women as frivolous, and only see ourselves marrying a man?
Some people might argue that stereotypes and tropes like these are based in truth. But research doesn’t back that up. A 2016 study found that straight women tend to think of their male/female friendships as similar to sibling relationships. Straight men define theirs as “just friends”. Both ways of constructing and viewing their relationship were linked to high levels of friendship satisfaction. To be clear, no sexual vibes were detected. The friendships were just that… friendships.
Instead of thinking of male/female friendships as harmful or wrong, we need to accept that they are both healthy and necessary. Research finds that these friendships are valuable because they give both parties “new understandings and perspectives” about each other. And this helped to build empathy and compassion for other people and genders. If I had a male partner, the red flag would be if they didn’t have any female friends, at work or otherwise.
Ultimately, though, it comes down to trust. It’s wildly unrealistic to think your partner’s never going to be attracted to someone else. Whether someone’s monogamous or not, they just can’t control who they fancy. What they can control is how they behave around that person and whether they act on those feelings. Through honest conversations and clear boundary setting, this can be easily managed so you both feel comfortable and safe in your friendships.
“I always wondered why I was never fully accepted in to anyone's close-knit group.”
For a lot of us, trusting is easier said than done. Our personal, family, and relationship histories all play a part in that. But if your partner having a friend of another gender makes you feel icky, afraid, or insecure, it’s worth interrogating that feeling and being curious about where it comes from. If your partner gives you genuine reasons not to trust them, that’s a whole other thing.
Most of the commenters on the TikTok post are women in straight-presenting relationships. But let’s, for a moment, think about what it would mean for LGBTQIA+ people if they couldn’t be friends with people of any gender that they’re attracted to. If I (a bisexual who has the potential to be attracted to people of all genders) lived by these unhinged standards, I wouldn’t be allowed to have any friends at work. And in this cruel world, where work takes up all our time and energy for very little in return, how deeply miserable would that be?
No matter our gender or sexuality, work is sadly where we spend the majority of our one, precious life. If we couldn’t form meaningful connections there, with people who made it just a little bit more tolerable, what truly sad little lives we’d lead.
