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Dating your boss raised her salary by 6%.
The breakup cost her 18%.
30 years of Finnish data just proved what most people find out the hard way.
Emily Nix, a finance professor at USC Marshall School of Business, spent years analysing administrative data covering the entire population of Finland from 1988 to 2018. Every cohabiting couple in the country. Every job. Every salary. Every breakup.
The findings, published in Fortune, are the most comprehensive dataset on workplace romance ever assembled.
And the headline number is not the one most people are talking about.
The numbers:
📈 +6% — average earnings increase for the subordinate while the relationship lasts
📉 -18% — average earnings fall after the breakup
🚪 13 percentage points more likely to leave the workforce entirely in the year after the breakup
📊 14% higher staff turnover at the organisation after a workplace romance begins
Key finding
When the subordinate moved to a new firm, the earnings gains shrank by half. When the manager left, they disappeared entirely. These results, in Nix's own words, "look less like talent development and more like a manager giving preferential treatment to someone they're dating."
The controversial take
The 6% salary bump is not the story. The 18% drop is. The Finnish data proves that the workplace romance does not cost the subordinate when it ends. It costs them because it was never really about merit to begin with. The pay came with conditions attached. And when the relationship ends, so does everything built on it.
This has been documented well beyond Finland. In the US, SHRM research found that 41% of workplace relationships involve a power imbalance, and 29% of respondents admitted their workplace relationship was motivated at least partly by career advancement, job security, or power. The UK's updated Employment Rights Act, effective October 2026, now holds employers to a higher standard of liability for power-imbalanced relationships precisely because the data shows how consistently they damage the lower-power person.
In India, the TCS Nashik case in 2026, where allegations of grooming, manipulation, and coercion spanning four years led to nine FIRs and seven arrests, illustrated what happens when workplace power imbalance goes unchecked entirely. The relationship appears consensual at the surface. The structure underneath it is something else.
I have covered this territory in Kay Reports before. I wrote about love contracts and who they actually protect. I wrote about why you cannot ghost your coworker and the power imbalance hiding inside office relationships. And I wrote about the proximity principle and why so many workplace romances begin because of convenience rather than genuine choice.
The Finnish data ties all of it together. The number that should concern anyone considering a relationship with their manager is not the salary increase. It is the mechanism behind it. If the pay bump disappears the moment the manager leaves, it was never yours. It was borrowed. And borrowed things get taken back.
🚩 The red flags
Your career improved after the relationship began.
A pay rise, a promotion, a better project, a shift in how your work is recognised. None of these things are automatically suspicious. But the Finnish data asks a pointed question: would this have happened if you worked in a different department under a different manager? If the honest answer is probably not, the advancement is not evidence of your ability. It is evidence of proximity to power. That distinction matters enormously when the relationship ends.
The relationship is kept secret specifically to protect their career.
There is a difference between privacy and concealment. Keeping a relationship quiet to let it develop without outside pressure is one thing. Being asked specifically not to disclose because of what it would mean for their position, their reputation, or their management of your team is another. The Finnish data shows that 82% of workplace relationships are hidden from management. When the secrecy primarily protects the more powerful person, the less powerful person is carrying the risk alone.
Ending the relationship feels professionally dangerous.
This is the finding from the Finnish study that deserves the most attention. The research found that the threat of career damage increases the likelihood of staying in a relationship past its natural end. When ending a relationship means losing not only a partner but your job or professional standing, the incentive to stay even in an unhappy situation is strong. If you feel you cannot end this relationship without professional consequences, that feeling is the data point. It is the most honest signal available about the true nature of the power structure you are in.
✅ When it is not a red flag
Not all workplace relationships with a seniority difference are exploitative. The Finnish study found that these relationships last longer on average than comparable relationships, and many do result in genuine long-term partnerships. The distinction is in the structure: when neither person's career depends on the other's goodwill, when the relationship can be openly acknowledged without professional consequences, when either person could end it freely and retain their professional standing, and when the pay and career trajectory of the subordinate can be clearly traced to their own performance rather than to proximity, the relationship occupies a very different risk profile. The question is always whether both people are genuinely free.
The Kay Reports rule
The salary bump is not yours until it survives the breakup. If your career depends on someone staying in a specific role in your life, the career is not yours either. Real professional standing is the kind that moves with you when the relationship does not.
🤖 Tools worth knowing
🎙️ Fireflies.ai
Record and transcribe conversations, including debrief conversations with trusted friends when a workplace situation feels unclear. Reading back what was actually said, stripped of the emotional charge of the moment, often surfaces dynamics that are hard to name in real time.
📋 Typeform
Build a private honest reflection form. Three questions worth answering before any significant decision inside a power-imbalanced relationship: Would my career be in the same position if this relationship ended tomorrow? Would I feel free to raise a concern with my manager if I needed to? Have I said yes to things at work that I would have said no to before the relationship began? Answered honestly, those three questions surface a lot.
⚙️ Make
If you are in the middle of a complicated workplace situation and need to document it, Make can automate the logging of communications, timelines, and records. When a power-imbalanced relationship becomes a professional dispute, organised documentation is often the difference between a resolved situation and an unresolvable one.
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If this landed somewhere, forward it to someone who needed to read it. The Finnish study covered 30 years of data. The 18% is not a prediction. It is a pattern that has already played out for thousands of people. Knowing it beforehand changes the calculation.
Hit reply and tell me: have you ever been in a workplace relationship where your professional standing changed when the relationship did? I read every response.
Kay Reports — Date smarter, not harder. Every Friday. kayreports.com