The office romance is having a strange little moment. We have spent the last decade making workplaces safer, more professional and increasingly conscious of boundaries, and yet we still cannot stop fancying the person sitting across the meeting room.

A 2025 YouGov survey for dating app Ashley Madison found that 40% of Indian respondents had dated or were currently dating a colleague, putting India second among the 11 countries surveyed. The caveat, obviously, is that Ashley Madison is a platform built around discreet relationships, so this isn’t exactly a census of Corporate India. Still, 40% is difficult to dismiss as an HR aberration.

“Workplaces have always been a breeding ground for romance, and I don’t think that’s about to change anytime soon,” says Radhika Agrawal, author of Not Safe For Work (HarperCollins). “Where else do you even meet people offline these days? We spend 8-9 hours a day, 5-6 days a week at the office with the same group of people, so it’s only natural that we get to know our colleagues inside out and often develop feelings for them.”

But what has changed isn’t necessarily our appetite for office romance. It is our tolerance for the mess that follows.

A former HR executive with the Tata Group tells me that employees would sometimes come to HR because relationships between colleagues had become “very disruptive”, particularly when couples were on the same team. A fight could turn into what she describes as a “cold war”: two people who had once worked perfectly well together suddenly stopped speaking, avoided each other and forced the rest of the team to navigate the fallout.

Tata’s position is relatively pragmatic. Its equal-opportunity statement says it respects employees’ right to privacy and does not concern itself with conduct outside work unless it affects performance, creates a conflict of interest or adversely affects the company.

After hours

An IT professional from Hyderabad has arrived at a similar conclusion, albeit before anything had the opportunity to go wrong. He says he knows plenty of colleagues who go out for dinner and coffee but deliberately keep things platonic because there is, in his words, “a sense of ownership and responsibility” about not making the workplace murky.

He had liked a colleague himself. They worked in different departments, so there was no direct reporting relationship, and they enjoyed spending time together. But then they noticed something: every date somehow became another meeting.

“We started discussing work everywhere we went,” he says. “We realised that it would never be something where we could share our interests.”

So they took “a hard stand”: they still meet, but keep it platonic. It is perhaps the most 2026 office romance imaginable — attraction, followed by a risk assessment.

And women may have more reason to worry about what happens once a romance becomes office property. A study of close to 1,000 adults across US industries by Rebecca Chory, Lisa Mainiero and Sean Horan, published in the International Journal of Business Communication, found that workplace romances were perceived as more damaging to women’s careers than men’s.

One woman I spoke to knows exactly what that can feel like. Her romance with a colleague began with “cute banter”, shared notes after meetings and long evenings working together on presentations. They went for coffee and dinner. Then colleagues started talking. Eventually, she realised he was telling people about their relationship more openly than she was.

“It became really awkward,” she tells me.

What had felt mutual and private suddenly had an audience. Eventually, she asked to be transferred.

Two people entered the romance, but only one person moved departments.

And then there is the line companies really cannot afford to ignore: hierarchy. A 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research study using Finnish administrative data found that entering a relationship with a manager was associated with a 6% increase in the subordinate’s earnings, while a breakup triggered an abrupt 18% decline. Retention among other employees also fell by six percentage points, suggesting that colleagues notice when romance starts looking suspiciously like preferential treatment.

This changing power dynamic is exactly what Radhika wanted to explore in Not Safe For Work. “Traditionally speaking, when we’ve seen workplace romances represented in pop culture or even discussed IRL, there’s been a stereotypical dynamic of a powerful male boss and a younger female subordinate,” she says. “But workplaces are changing, with more women taking on senior leadership roles.”

So in her novel, Kavya is the boss, and Neil is the intern.

Perhaps that is the real office romance of 2026. Not don’t date your colleague, but know what happens when attraction meets hierarchy, gossip, power and the Monday morning meeting.

A fortnightly guide to love in the age of bare minimum

Published - August 14, 2026 03:41 pm IST