Their giggles and chatter floated over from behind me, pulling me away from my devoted concentration to a salad roll.
The cafe had quickly crowded with the lunch-time office set, but this couple at the next table seemed to float in a bubble within it, oblivious and enthralled at the same time as they exchanged gossip, shared problems from home, compared how they each handled their kids, griped about HR.
Yes, I was now fully eavesdropping.
They were clearly good mates. She wore a ring, he wore a ring. They knew all about each other and had a shared language about the nonsense that is a workplace that was unintelligible to anyone but them. They were warm and friendly, but nothing more.
As we trickle back to our offices, I've witnessed a few of these encounters in lunch spots around the city: workers who are colleagues, but who obviously like each other enough to go and have lunch and shoot the breeze. It's nice to see.
Was there something more going on with these two? I don't know — maybe? A light fizz of flirtation seemed to waft towards me as they chatted. I have a theory about this kind of stuff, forged in the pre-MeToo days back at my old paper, The Age: if you thought some couple was up to it, then they invariably were, because there is an undeniably kinetic energy that crackles across the room in spite of the poker faces of the mutually attracted. (I know this to be true: I was once one of those couples.)
But romance or not, it hardly mattered: the connection between these two was real and it reminded me of more recent times, the ones before we were sent scurrying home to work, and when the non-domestic relationships in our working life could come to mean just as much as the ones back at the house.
I mean those relationships with a sympathetic other who knows all about Linda in accounts without needing any explanation or context; the person with whom you can share mildly inappropriate jokes about your life, safe in the knowledge that no-one will ever think of going to HR.
It reminded me of our days of being at the office so regularly, that many of us ended up adopting a "work wife". Or work husband. And I wonder whether some of us might be missing those days.
The best thing about the office
The uncomplicated pleasure of the work-wife relationship is one of the few things that makes office life worthwhile.
It's a different thing to the workmate: the work "marriage" is like a chosen form of near-intimacy, in which the same kind of joint purpose that is a domestic relationship — coming together to raise kids, keep a home, keep animals, keep house — is applied to the obligations of work.
We've all had one — male, female, gay, straight or otherwise (I'm using the term "wife" generically here) — and often, being the close confidant they are, they save your real "wife" from being burdened at home with the grim minutiae of the office mill. Instead, we keep it for our work spouses — they get it.
The Society for Human Resource Management in the US would not approve of any of this: they want us to stop talking about work wives, because their pre-pandemic survey of workers who admitted to a work spouse revealed that fully 50 per cent of them were actually attracted to them — a risky situation for everyone involved. (Says the person who married the man she met at her office.)
That risk aside, though, what these cafe encounters really reminded me of was the life outside the family home that many working people — women and men, but for me especially women — might be denying themselves right now in the name of flexibility.
I've heard from so many women over the past three years whose stories reveal an as-yet unwritten part of these times: that the world women since the 1950's fought so hard to expand for themselves and their daughters has, for many, shrunk a great deal — and shrunk right back down to a life at home.
I don't want to romanticise the drudge and tedium of the office life, and this argument might not apply for people whose workplaces are physically hard, dangerous or remote, but when it works well, a working life away from home can be a pleasingly separate life, expressing a separate identity that has nothing to do with how we are defined domestically.
There is something very powerful in that moment of walking out the front door, or swinging the child-care gate closed behind you: stepping out to work on your own not as wife, not as mother but as you. The act of going to the office somewhere separate from your family always consecrated a singular identity for us, and we might be forgetting that.
I well understand the convenience of doing more work from home: that works for me too, when a load of washing can be sorted between meetings, when the drop-off and pick-up is easier.
But I also really like my life away from home, where washing can't intrude on my thoughts, and I can unapologetically be the other person I have worked so hard to become.
Maybe it's different for men, for whom work is often more closely linked with identity. And I must admit, I don't have a work husband/wife at the office these days. But when I slip into my chair and turn on the mic, I'm nobody's wife either. And sometimes I really like that.
This weekend, the other psychosocial workplace hazards, the other Sam Kerrs and all that other tricky sex stuff that's so important for your young people. And when life changes, you change too – just ask Kate Ceberano who is a vulnerable, warm and funny joy in the new episode of my podcast You Don't Know Me. I've never known her in better voice and she is wonderful company. You can listen and sign up for weekly drops here.
Have a safe and happy weekend and yes, I'm afraid I've caught the pink disease, too. There's no escaping Barbie and hot pink is hot business. Just ask Dua Lipa, one of the artists of the moment who make up the movie's impressive soundtrack. On your toes, everyone. And go well.
Virginia Trioli is presenter on Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.