A growing number of employers are asking employees who date coworkers to sign formal paperwork about it, commonly known as “love contracts” or consensual relationship agreements, and the data on why is less about office gossip and more about liability math.
The numbers driving employer anxiety
Workplace romance itself is common enough that companies can’t just ban it away. In the Society for Human Resource Management’s most recent Workplace Romance Report, based on a January 2024 survey of 1,073 U.S. workers, 17% of employees said they were currently in a workplace romance and 41% said they’d had one at some point. Only about half, 51%, of people currently dating a coworker had disclosed it to their employer, and nearly a quarter, 22%, said they were outed by someone else at work rather than coming forward themselves. Just 31% of organizations formally require employees to disclose workplace relationships, SHRM found, while 44% have no such requirement and 25% of workers simply don’t know their company’s policy either way.
That gap between how common office romance is and how rarely companies have clear rules for it is exactly the space love contracts are designed to close. Employment attorneys at Woods Rogers PLC note that workplace relationships aren’t a fringe issue to begin with — 41% of people report having married someone they met at work, per Forbes Advisor data cited in the firm’s analysis, and separate SHRM figures show 40% of employees admit to flirting with a colleague and 24% have gone on an actual date with one.
Why a signature matters more than a policy
The legal logic is straightforward: a signed agreement is harder to argue with later than an unwritten office norm. Attorneys at Bodman PLC describe love contracts as evidence “that the workplace relationship was consensual, and that the employees were aware of the employer’s key policies” — a paper trail that matters most if a relationship between a supervisor and a subordinate ends badly and turns into a harassment complaint or retaliation claim. Standard provisions typically include an acknowledgment that the relationship is voluntary, conflict-of-interest language barring one partner from supervising or evaluating the other, restrictions on public displays of affection at work, and a requirement to notify HR if the relationship ends.
The push has picked up renewed attention in 2026: the California Employers Association urged member companies this year to pair anti-harassment training with consensual relationship agreements specifically, framing them as a compliance layer under state fair-employment law rather than an optional HR nicety. That’s a shift from how love contracts were treated even a few years ago, when SHRM’s own 2021 workplace romance data described the agreements as controversial and noted that most employment law experts still consider them unenforceable as binding contracts. Employers appear to be adopting them anyway, less because a signature stops a relationship from going wrong and more because it gives HR something concrete to point to if it does.
