Who killed the office romance? Researchers have a few suspects

Cupid appears to be losing his grip on the American office.

The Society for Human Resource Management's (SHRM) 2025 Workplace Romance research has found the share of employees reporting a workplace crush dropped from 49% to 22% in a single year. Dates with colleagues slipped from 21% to 16%, and reports of a "risky romantic encounter" on the job fell from 13% to 7%.

The findings, from a survey of 1,071 U.S. workers, have fueled speculation that Gen Z and years of HR training have killed the office romance. Two researchers who've spent decades studying the subject told HRD the story is more complicated.

A generation opting out

Chuck Pierce, dean and professor of management at Oakland University's School of Business Administration in Rochester, Michigan, has a leading suspect: a generation that's opting out of relationships altogether, not just at work.

"If you ask a lot of 20-year-olds, would you date someone at work? No. And does that mean they wouldn't date them because they're at work? No, I think it just means there's a lot of 20-year-olds that don't want a relationship," Pierce said.

He points to the same generation delaying or skipping marriage, cohabitation, and parenthood, often citing financial pressure as the reason.

"I'm never even going to be able to afford a house, so why would I need a spouse? I can just rent, buy three [grocery] items at a time, and live alone and work my job. I don't need a spouse, I don't need a kid. That's going to creep into workplace romances."

That reluctance isn't only economic, Pierce said. He sees it socially too, in a generation that seems less interested in interacting with each other at all, not just in dating.

"I've worked in university settings for over 30 years, and it used to be guys and girls hanging out on campus. Not anymore. I go to the student union and it's girls at this table and guys at this table and nobody's talking to anybody. They're all on their phones."

The disclosure theory

Amy Nicole Baker, professor of psychology at the University of New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut, has studied workplace romance for 20 years, and agrees fewer young people want relationships generally. But her leading suspect for the SHRM numbers specifically has less to do with attraction than with confession.

Her research over the years has found that respondents happily discuss other people's romances, and their own past ones. Questions about a current relationship are the ones left blank.

"When it's actually happening, that's when people skip the question," she said. "If they're getting a strong message from the workplace, this is not cool, they'll still date. They'll just hide."

"My suspicion is people are having these relationships at the same rate, but how they're disclosing it is changing."

Applied to SHRM's numbers, that theory suggests the drop in reported crushes says less about how many workers are attracted to a colleague than about how many are willing to admit it.

Baker also points to a shorter-term shift: the bond COVID once created between colleagues. She saw a spike in workplace romance during the pandemic, driven partly by isolation and a shared experience of upheaval.

"People were more hungry for connection, and they were just connecting remotely," Baker said. "They were still interacting, and they were also sharing a common bond, which was we all went through this horrible pandemic together, and many people were forced to work in ways they hadn't been expecting to."

That shared experience tended to bond people, she said. Now that the disruption has faded, so has some of the glue.

"That personal glue that holds people together, now we're back to normal," she said.

The fear factor

Both researchers see the MeToo movement as another suspect. Years of expanded sexual harassment training and a sharper awareness of legal risk, informed in part by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's own task force findings on workplace harassment, have made workers more cautious about pursuing or admitting to a relationship with a colleague, even if the underlying attraction hasn't changed. Baker said harassment training has improved since the movement began, and its effect shows up in openness more than in attraction.

"Some of the research on workplace romance shows that the company culture doesn't necessarily stop people from getting together," she said. "It stops them from reporting it or being open about it."

Pierce described a workplace where the perceived cost of a misstep has climbed sharply.

"In 1997, a guy could go to work and ask a woman out on a date, and she might say no, and that was the end of it," he said. "We're in more of a lawsuit, law claim, complaint world than we were in decades ago."

Pierce's own research complicates that fear, though. Dissolved workplace romances, he found, don't usually end in harassment claims.

Even so, the fear persists, and Pierce says that comes down to perception. An ordinary romantic gesture can look very different once a relationship ends.

"If I sent you a romantic card or flowers, that would be fine. But if we break up and then a week later I send you flowers, that can be seen as harassing or inappropriate," he said. "A normal romantic behavior can be seen as harassing."

What the data means for HR policy

One SHRM finding complicates the doom narrative. In the report, 63% of managers said romances on their teams had a positive impact, while just 12% reported a negative effect.

"I've heard that for years, but the research doesn't support it," Baker said. "We know that it can make people much more uncomfortable. We know that it can make people trust the partners less. And erosion of trust does not make for a creative workplace."

Pierce, on the other hand, sees genuine upside for the employees involved. He's published research on the performance effects of workplace romance.

"People involved in a workplace romance sometimes are better performers than those who aren't," he said. "They're bringing the energy of the relationship, the positiveness of the relationship to work."

Neither Pierce nor Baker endorsed the blanket bans some employers still reach for when creating a policy for office romances.

"You can forbid it all you want, but they're still going to do it. And if you forbid it, you just drive it underground," Baker said. "You force people to hide, and then as it becomes more secret, it also becomes more corrosive."

Her advice lands somewhere in between. Discourage supervisor-subordinate relationships, require prompt disclosure, and work with both parties to remove the reporting line, an approach many employers already take when they handle romances between supervisors and subordinates.

Pierce pointed to consensual relationship agreements (CRAs), sometimes called Cupid contracts or love contracts, in which both parties confirm in writing that a disclosed relationship is voluntary and mutual. He cautioned that nobody has tested whether these contracts work.

"There's not really a good study on the effectiveness of CRAs, and that's just a study I've been wanting to do for decades," he said.

Overly restrictive rules carry their own cost, he added, a theme HRD has explored in its coverage of how HR can manage workplace romance.

"They might have couples that are going to leave if you have an overly restrictive policy," Pierce said.

For Baker, what matters most has less to do with formal policy than with the everyday culture a company builds.

"You want a workplace where people feel respected for the work they do, not the relationships that they have," she said.