A Valentine’s Day Sermon: Why Office Relationships Are Self-Destructive

Editor’s Note: Readers sometimes ask about past TLNT articles, so every Friday we republish a Classic TLNT post.

Every year around February 14, just like clockwork, the workplace-oriented polls, surveys and so-called experts with some insight or opinion about Valentine’s Day and office romance come out of the woodwork.

They always seem to focus on two issues: the numbers of people who have romantic relationships with co-workers, or, the inherent problems that arise when people do so.

This year is no different. Here are just a few of the ones that landed in my in-box:

Vault.com’s 7 th Annual Office Romance Survey (touted in the subject line of their e-mail as “Cupid in the Cubicle”) found that “almost 60 percent of respondents admitted to having participated in some form of office romance.” Fun fact from this survey: although 33 percent of those surveyed admitted to actually having a tryst (yes, you know what that is) in the office, only 4 percent says they were caught in flagrante delicto at work.
CareerBuilder’s annual office romance survey reports that “approximately 40 percent of workers (37 percent) say they have dated someone they worked with over their career” while nearly one in five (18 percent) report dating co-workers at least twice in their career. Fun fact from this survey: 30 percent report they went on to marry a person they dated in the office. There’s no data on how those marriages fared.
CareerBuilder Canada’s annual Valentine’s Day survey found that only “31 percent of workers say they have dated someone they work with over their career” … with one in ten (11 percent) dating co-workers at least twice during their career. Fun fact from this survey: Canadians seem to be a lot smarter (and more restrained) about diddling around with co-workers than their American counterparts are.