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It was around 7:30 p.m. on a weeknight when Rachel Segal decided to hold hands with her husband. Big mistake.

"You can't do that here," warned Adam Bullied, her husband, noting that they were still in the office. He snatched his hand away.

"I said, 'Nobody's here!' " recalls Ms. Segal, a marketing manager in Toronto.

The hand-holding rejection occurred when the couple worked at a technology company in the United States prior to moving back to Toronto and taking jobs at separate companies earlier this year. At the time, they made a concerted effort to keep their relationship out of the workplace.

"But there were times when we were both in meetings and didn't agree on something and it made people uncomfortable even though it was a healthy work conversation," Ms. Segal says. "All of a sudden [people wondered], 'Is this about something besides work?' "

Given that even a married couple have to be careful about how they behave at work, it's no surprise that some companies are asking employees to sign a "love contract" at the start of an office relationship.

A love contract is commonly used when one member of a couple is in a subordinate role to the other. The agreement aims to protect a company from a potential sexual harassment lawsuit while also laying down the law regarding public displays of affection and favouritism, both of which are proscribed. At the core of the agreement is an acknowledgment by both parties that they are entering into a consensual relationship.

Ms. Segal says her employer didn't use love contracts, but she had heard about them thanks to a brief mention on The Office.

"It seemed more like a joke," she says.

Not only are love contracts real, but recent coverage on Good Morning America and in publications such as Newsweek has turned them into the office trend of the moment in the United States.

Brian Grosman, founding and senior partner of Toronto employment law firm Grosman, Grosman & Gale, says the love contract appears to be largely an American phenomenon, though a similar agreement once crossed his desk.

"Love contract is not a term [used in Canada]," he says. "But there are agreements that identify the interaction between these two people as being totally consensual."

He says clauses about public displays of affection or favouritism haven't made it across the border.

Christine Barney, head of Miami public relations firm RBB, spoke to the media about the love contract she signed at a previous job. (A paucity of first-person stories is probably due to confidentiality agreements.)

"We sat in a room and read the contract that asked if either of us was being harassed," Ms. Barney told Newsweek, describing the meeting that brought her and her future husband together with company representatives. "It was awkward, but we did it to set an example."

Danny Kaufer, a partner at Heenan Blaikie in Montreal who specializes in labour and employment law, is skeptical about the value of a love contract. "Do I really need to put it in writing that as manager or superior you should not prefer one employee to another?" he says.

Mr. Kaufer says the love contract marks a difference between Canada and the United States. "Americans are far more litigious on issues of employment."

James McDonald, managing partner of the Irvine, Calif. office of employment law firm Fisher & Phillips, says he's drafted "a couple of dozen" love contracts over the past year. He agrees they are partly an outgrowth of a litigious environment.

"In the U.S. there have been greater numbers of sexual harassment lawsuits resulting from workplace romances," he says. "Employers are also seeing more relationships develop between employees because they spend so much time in physical proximity, or are constantly text messaging, e-mailing and instant messaging one another."

Mr. McDonald notes that love contract is the casual term applied to these agreements. The most recent one sitting on his desk is titled, "Acknowledgement of Consensual Relationship." Ah, romance.

Mr. McDonald says the love contract isn't appropriate for every kind of office romance.

"Many people do meet at work and fall in love and marry co-workers," he says. "Other people tend to bounce from one illicit affair to another, and that's the kind of thing I would not encourage a client to accommodate [with a love contract]."

After all, explicit in a love contract is the concept of love. Nobody calls them "office affair agreements." This means a love contract may also have the unintended effect of making a couple take their relationship more seriously.

"If you're only in it for game-playing and secrecy, then making the relationship public [with a love contract] takes away some of the thrill," says Janie Harden Fritz, an associate professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Duquesne University and the author of Problematic Relationships in the Workplace.

Dr. Fritz says love contracts are a result of companies trying to manage workplace romances. She points to research conducted in 2001 that found 23 per cent of American companies asked employees to notify them if they were dating. By 2005, it had increased to 39 per cent.

In Canada, a survey published last year by career website Workopolis found that close to 20 per cent of working adults have been involved in an office romance. This statistic, combined with the recent rise in press coverage, suggests that the love contract could make its way to Canada.

"Now that you're telling me and everybody else about it, I'm sure I'm going to see a few of them," says Mr. Grosman. "Maybe this week."

By the numbers

22

Percentage of Canadians who

say their workplace has a policy against office romances.

35

Percentage who say there shouldn't be a rule against

dating colleagues.

92

Percentage of Canadians aged

18 to 24 who say there shouldn't be a rule against dating

colleagues.

45

Percentage of those Canadians who had an office romance who tried to keep it secret.

81

Percentage of Canadians aged

18 to 24 who had an office

romance and were open about it.

Source: Workopolis.com, 2007