“I didn’t expect to make friends after a certain age, and I certainly didn’t expect to find friends, let alone family, when I joined my current workplace. The day I started working, I decided that I would think of this job only as a learning experience and not look for friends. It was a startup, and there weren’t many people in the company to begin with. Also, in my mind, I was too old to make new friends. To my surprise, I became very good friends with another colleague who had joined before me. An intern who joined afterwards was so much younger than us that we started referring to him as ‘the kid’. Soon he became ‘our kid’.

My thick-as-thieves friend jokingly referred to herself as my work-wife and the kid our work-son. Suddenly, I had an entirely new family. Three other colleagues who joined later also became part of our work family. This private joke about us being a family has made our relationships so much more special. One by one, some of the members of our work family left the office for other opportunities such as different jobs, marriage and moving abroad, but my friend and I continued. We both even went through the empty nest syndrome when everyone else left. We had come full circle—it had begun with the two of us and eventually, only we were left behind. This made our bond even stronger.

Today we are all in different cities but we make time for each other. We call, visit and try to spend time with our ‘work family’. These friends have changed my perspective about friendship and family. People say that we can’t choose our families, but my work friends have proved this age-old saying wrong. This is a family of my choosing, and I would never trade it for any other relationship in the world."