I’ve been in my current job for about two years now. I’ve got the option to work from home as much as I want, apart from the occasional in-person full team meetings and stuff. My old team wasn’t exactly social—they all hated coming into the office—so I used to go in maybe once every couple of months.

I started at the same time as a colleague, let’s call her Amy, who also rarely went into the office for the same reason—her team just didn’t bother.

A couple of months back, both Amy and I moved teams and ended up on the same one. This new team is a lot more social—they actually like coming into the office, going for lunch together, and planning the odd social activity. I’ve really enjoyed it because working from home all the time was starting to feel a bit isolating.

Now, I go into the office once or twice a week. Not everyone’s there every time, but when people from the team are in, we’ll usually sit together, grab lunch, and have a good chat. There are 8 of us on the team—5 women and 3 men—and sometimes I’ll go in and it’ll just be one other team member there. Whoever it is, we’ll usually grab lunch, but I don't know in advance who’s going to be in until I get there.

Amy and I tend to be the ones who go in the most because we’re both glad to have a team that’s a bit more sociable now. There have been a few times where it’s just the two of us grabbing lunch, but we always invite others who are around from different teams. Most of the time, they just say no. I've also been for lunch one of one with pretty much everyone on my new team at some point.

My girlfriend has started having an issue with how often I’m going into the office and the fact that I sometimes go for lunch with coworkers, especially if it’s one-on-one with Amy.

She’s said it’s weird to have lunch one-on-one with another woman, but I told her it’s just my colleagues. It’s not like I plan it to be just two of us—it’s just how it works out depending on who’s in that day. Plus, I’ve gone for lunch one-on-one with male colleagues and other women on the team too. It’s not like it’s always Amy.

She thinks that if only one other team member is going to be in, I shouldn’t go in at all, or at least I shouldn’t go to lunch with them. I told her there’s no issue with me making friends at work and that I don't know who is going to be in the office until I get there, but she reckons it’s disrespectful that I’m not taking her feelings on board and considering avoiding one-on-one lunches with another woman.

Am I wrong for going for lunch with coworkers?