More than half of American workers have dated a colleague at some point, and most of those pairings never show up in an HR file. But when the Society for Human Resource Management broke down exactly who is pairing off with whom, a less flattering picture emerged. A real slice of office couples involve someone with direct authority over the other person’s schedule, raise, or next promotion. That single detail changes everything about the story. It turns a harmless crush into a workplace risk, and it raises an uncomfortable question about how many people are climbing the ladder with a partner instead of a resume.
What SHRM’s Own Numbers Show
SHRM’s 2025 workplace romance research, based on surveys of 1,071 U.S. workers and 2,283 HR professionals conducted in December 2024, found that 54% of workplace relationships happen between peers of equal rank. Read the other way, that means a meaningful share of office romances are not between equals at all. The same research found that 29% of workers cited job-related motivations as a key factor in pursuing their workplace romance, not love or attraction alone. HR professionals aren’t naive about the risk either: 68% flagged perceptions of favoritism as their top concern, and 61% pointed to potential conflicts of interest.
When Your Partner Signs Your Performance Review
SHRM’s broader workplace romance research digs even further into the power question, and the numbers are worth sitting with. Among workers currently in an office relationship, 23% are involved with someone at a higher level in the organization, and 14% of past relationships involved a superior. Only 27% of workers said it’s acceptable for two people at different organizational levels who work together often to be in a relationship at all, which tells you most people already sense the problem instinctively. And when researchers asked people why they were dating up the chain, the answers split almost evenly: 33% said love, 32% said career advancement. That’s not a small minority rationalizing an affair. That’s roughly a third of people in cross-level relationships admitting, in a survey, that climbing was part of the calculation.
Dating the Boss Is More Common Than You’d Think
This isn’t a fringe scenario. A 2025 workforce study covered by Newsweek found that 32% of American workers say they have dated a boss or direct supervisor at some point in their career. Nearly a third. That figure lines up almost exactly with SHRM’s own superior-and-subordinate data, which is the kind of overlap that makes a pattern hard to dismiss as a fluke of one survey’s phrasing.
Why the Imbalance Matters More Than the Romance
None of this means every office romance is calculated or coercive. Most workers in SHRM’s research still say love is the biggest driver of their workplace relationships, and plenty of couples who met at work go on to build genuinely happy lives together. The issue is narrower and more specific: when one partner controls the other’s raises, assignments, or job security, the relationship stops being just personal. It becomes something coworkers watch, HR has to manage, and the less powerful partner has to navigate carefully even if nothing is wrong. That’s exactly why 68% of HR professionals name favoritism, not gossip or awkwardness, as their number one worry about these relationships.
There’s also a quieter cost that the numbers don’t fully capture. When nearly a third of people dating a superior admit career advancement played a role, it puts every promotion, every good project, and every kind word from that manager under a cloud of doubt, for the couple and for everyone around them. Even a completely genuine relationship can get read through that lens once the reporting structure comes into it, and that’s a hard thing to undo once colleagues start wondering.
If there’s a practical takeaway buried in all this data, it’s that the power gap, not the romance itself, is the thing worth naming early. Disclosing the relationship, removing a direct reporting line, or having a documented conversation with HR doesn’t kill the connection. It’s what keeps 23% from quietly becoming a headline, and it’s the difference between a couple who fell for each other at work and a couple everyone assumes fell for the org chart.
