Whether that headline made you clutch your pearls or something else, we’ll get to it. But just to be clear: The nooner we’re talking about is lunch.
One of the highlights of my last decade of work was having lunches with several pairs of friends or colleagues — all platonic, of course. But just like sexual threesomes, the lunches could fit into three broad categories: Ewww, taboo and yahoo.
Bon appétit:
Ewww
Lots of people have horror stories about being the third person on a date. The couple basically starts a PDA fest while you try to find a pencil to jab into your ear.
You don’t want lunches to be like that. Why are there three of you instead of two? If you and your workplace bestie are headed to lunch and a colleague wants to tag along, don’t say yes unless you both welcome it. It’s not fair to anyone.
But there are great reasons for threesomes. If a boss asks you to lunch, you might start thinking anything from “Am I being fired?” to “Are they hitting on me?” But if two people know they’re invited, there’s less paranoia. And if the boss happens to be toxic, there’s safety in numbers.
For me, threesomes helped bridge the generation gap. I was intrigued by new peers, but also old enough to be their father. Asking them to lunch could be cringey for both of us — especially if I asked a woman, who might have trouble deciding if I was being sleazy, pathetic or all of the above.
Inviting two, especially if they’re relatively close in age to each other, offers them insurance against the threat of a wild boor.
Taboo
Not all triangles are created equal. If two peers lunch with a boss or intern, the third person’s work gets most of the attention. That’s fine. It’s a business lunch. But when you have a personal lunch and the talk still revolves around your jobs, consider it a failure — unless there’s a crisis or some tremendously juicy gossip.
Suppose you expected a ménage à trois with Monique, but your partner invited Bubba. Your language of love might have gotten lost in translation.
The same problem (although not nearly as deflating) can occur with a lunchtime threesome. If Person A is already friends with Person B and Person C, but B and C don’t know each other well, you might get stuck talking about the least common denominator. That’s right. Work.
It’s on Person A to get around that. What do the other two have in common besides you? If you think it might be a taboo subject, do a little prep work. Maybe B got divorced three months ago and you don’t want to bring it up in front of C because the nerves might be too raw. But if you tell B in advance that C got divorced several years back, maybe B will bring it up — the two might even bond over it.
Yahoo
I wrote before about friendship horseshoes, the idea of encouraging people to join your group and sometimes even being a friendship matchmaker, like person A might have been in that example. If you and your work bestie do invite a third person to lunch, try to make your triangle feel like a comfortable horseshoe.
When I set up lunches, I tried to make sure the other two weren’t already friends, either because they were relatively new or their desks were a ways apart. I realized that because of the age difference, they could still end up in a long two-person conversation, but either that never happened or I was too clueless to realize that it did.
What did happen was that the lunches led to several friendships — some involving me, some not. All good.
Now is the perfect time to attempt a déjeuner à trois because so many people are returning to the office at least a couple of days a week. Even if you’re shy, it doesn’t take much to send a Slack message: “Since we’re stuck commuting here again, let’s make the best of it and have lunch (coffee, a happy hour, whatever).” Send it to half a dozen people if you want, hoping it’ll nudge at least a couple to join.
If you end up with a big group, that’s great, too, but try to get everyone to bring up at least something unrelated to work so you don’t fall back on the least common denominator again. And keep an eye out for the introverts, who might need a little coaxing to join the conversation.
Not everything has to wind up in a perfect triangle. You just have to find a shape that suits you.
Murphy Slaw
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