The Beatles said all you need is love. And many people are fulfilling their needs by the dim hum of the office copier or during late nights of number-crunching in the conference room. In the American office, love is truly in the air.

But management isn't quite sure what to make of all this workaday matchmaking. While less than one percent of all offices ban office loving outright, only 15 percent of all workplaces officially address the issue at all, says Dennis Powers, a Southern Oregon University professor and author of The Office Romance: Playing With Fire and Not Getting Burned. Most commonly, romances are unofficially allowed but discouraged. Powers calls this typical situation "benign neglect."

But it's time, he charges, that businesses acknowledge that office romance is an acceptable and normal situation.

"Cupid just needs a better PR agent, " says Powers. "It's a very natural, normal phenomenon, and it's flourished in spite of the bad press."

More than 8 million new office romances start each year, according to a 1994 survey by the American Management Association. And half of all workplace relationships lead to marriage or long-term commitments.

"You're more likely to meet somebody with similar interests in your work environment," Powers says.

He predicts that offices will lighten up in the near future. Fewer offices will ban romance and more will establish guidelines that allow employees to manage workplace dalliances. But other experts, particularly human resources managers and employment lawyers, are less optimistic about the future of office amour.

Love and loss?

All office affairs don't end at the altar. Some end badly, with bitter, unending parting lines like "I never want to see your blanking face again," uttered by pod mates who are forced to interact at least five days a week. And sometimes office affairs end really badly, with drawn out court battles and cries of sexual discrimination.

In the very worst cases, such courtroom dramas sully the name of the company, cost big bucks and zap office morale. And sometimes they affect the power equilibrium in the office, like when a boss becomes involved with his or her subordinate.

These situations and others are among the reasons why office policies don't jibe with reality in the case of office romance.

"There's just too many factors and gray areas," says Kristin Bowl, a spokeswoman for the Society for Human Resource Management. "Most offices don't care if someone in accounting is dating someone in research. More of the issues come when people work in the same department, especially if it's a small office."

~ While SHRM doesn't outright tell companies what to include when considering an office romance policy, it does advise strongly in favor of outlawing relations between supervisors and subordinates.

"It's really trouble waiting to happen, even if the relationship works well," says Bowl.

Love and hypocrisy

The problem is that many companies that talk tough about firing couples involved in a boss/subordinate relationship typically don't practice what they preach, Powers says.

"If a company is fast-tracking a woman up the corporate ladder and finds she is involved in a relationship with a subordinate, are they going to fire her?" he asks.

The answer is usually "no," he says. "There's a big difference between what corporations will tell the media and what they'll actually do," he says, adding that the companies that discussed such scenarios with him for his book have done so on the condition of anonymity.

"The major reason is they don't want the controversy," he says. "They're afraid if they took what is an enlightened stand as to what they really did, it might be used against them in a law suit."

Sign on the dotted line

Only 4 percent of cases of office romance resulted in claims of sexual harassment that led to litigation, according to SHRM's 1998 survey. Still, many companies have had to deal with the repercussions from enough affairs gone ugly to warrant some sort of intervention. Some companies have date-and-tell policies requiring parties to document the romance (not the juicy details, just that it's happening) to HR managers.

Another novel approach is the "love contract," a legal document signed by both parties that protects the involved employees and the employer if and when love goes wrong, says Jeff Tanenbaum, a partner at San Francisco-based Littler Mendelson who created the first contracts about 10 years ago. Since then, the company has drawn up more than 1,000 contracts. Other firms specializing in employment law have entered the love business as well.

"One of the reasons this is one of the more effective human resources approaches is because it makes employees part of the decision making process rather than telling them what they must do," says Tanenbaum, who prefers calling the documents by their legal name: "consensual relationship agreements."

He wrote his first one about 10 years ago on behalf of a president of a company who was involved with an employee. After reading about another president at another company who got sued to the tune of millions of dollars by his ex-lover/employee, this president decided the idea of a "pre" pre-nuptial agreement wasn't such a bad idea.

"As far as he knew the relationship was wonderful and absolutely consensual, but he was really concerned about this," says Tanenbaum. "He wanted something that explained to this woman that she didn't have to be in this relationship and [that she should] not feel pressured at all to be in the relationship."

He says the woman had a good laugh and signed the agreement. The couple later married.

~ In another case, a romance between co-workers was beginning to sour and the two employees were "fighting like cats and dogs," he says. The squabbling couple signed an agreement acknowledging the existence of the company's sexual harassment policy and that they were aware the two of them were neither compelled to stay in the relationship nor would they be penalized for staying together. Tanenbaum says the couple "got control" of themselves at work after signing the document.

In a third case, two employees were happily involved when, one day, one was picked for promotion. Although the relationship wasn't causing work problems, the company wanted something drawn up making both parties aware that outside help existed within the company if the altered power relationship started affecting work, he says.

Love, exciting and new

In practical terms, most people have office relationships below the HR radar. Like many couples, Amy Touchette, an editor at Princeton Review, and her boyfriend, Dave Smith, another editor, kept their relationship secret in the early stages.

"We both acknowledged at the beginning that this probably wasn't a good idea," says Touchette, 30. "But it turned out we didn't care - probably because I was old enough to know it felt different. I think we were both hoping it would work out okay, but you can always just get another job [if it doesn't.]"

As it turned out, the blossoming romance made her long hours, including weekend trips to the office, fun instead of dreadful, she says.

"We were working really bad hours and in the same situation," she says. "But I was working with a guy I had a huge crush on and it made going to work fun."

They dated in secret for months before being outed at the 1999 Christmas party.

"I was pretty happy the way the company handled it," she adds. "Dave and I are definitely professional together and they gave us the benefit of the doubt."

Liza Greene says she probably never would have realized her true love was on the same floor as her - he was the public relations director - had they not been thrust together to work on a newsletter. At the time, she thought he was "totally not my style."

But once she saw how clever he was and how good he was under pressure, her feelings changed. She was then hooked. But being a private person, she was adamant about keeping the relationship discreet until shortly before they became engaged.

Although she suspects some people knew about their affair, the best man, a co-worker, still got a lot of laughs with his wedding speech.

"He said, 'there's something I've been wanting to say for awhile. Liza and Robert are dating,'" says Greene, the creative director at Time magazine. "By then, it was no longer a secret."

Love stinks

But for every happily-ever-after story, there are hellish stories of bad breakups.

Although they've been broken up for more than a year, one tech worker at a dot-com consultancy says it still eats him up that he's forced to see his ex-girlfriend every day. It's especially hard because they work in a small Manhattan office.

The secretive affair was rocky from the start and the ending was horrific, says the 29-year-old. After giving him the silent treatment during a weekend-long trip in Vermont, the girl friend apologized, saying, "I didn't want to do it this way.'"

"I said 'drop dead,' and drove away," he recalls. However, the unfortunate employee was forced to see his (still living) ex-sweetie at work the very next day.

He says working with her doesn't get better over time. He doesn't talk to her unless it's absolutely necessary. And although he doesn't look for occasions to attack her, when she does make carelss errors, the fangs come out.

"The things she does are just sloppy and they sometimes take me a lot of time to fix," he says. "I won't hold back yelling at her when she screws something up. Maybe if it was anyone else screwing up, I wouldn't be as rough. But the bottom line is while I do criticize her for that stuff, I know I'm on solid ground."

"I'm sure she thinks it's just because I'm bitter," he says. "She's probably half-right."

The IT director says while he hasn't totally soured on office romance, he would definitely be ready to find a new job before getting involved with another co-worker.

"You have to be prepared for the fact that if it doesn't work out, you're going to be reminded of that fact every single day until one of you leaves," he says. "That's not to say that it can't work out, but the stakes are even higher at a small office than a big one.

"If I did pursue [someone else], I would have to be totally prepared to find another place to work," he adds.